AnitA PAllenberg
Marianne Faithfull’s first impression of her great friend Anita Pallenberg was unforgettable. “She was the most incredible woman I’d met in my life,” wrote Faithfull in her 1994 memoir. “Dazzling, beautiful, hypnotic and unsettling… Other women evaporated next to her.” More than just a muse, Pallenberg was an integral part of The Rolling Stones’ entourage during the ’60s, helping shape their transition from blues-loving London naïfs to cosmopolitan superstars. Born to Italian-German parents in Rome, she’d been expelled from a Munich boarding school aged 16, after which she returned home, signed up at art school and became a model. Pallenberg hung out with filmmakers and the Roman intelligentsia, then left for New York, where she met Andy Warhol and the Factory crowd. Fluent in several languages, she represented something otherworldly and exotic to the Stones, opening up their world to a new strata of bohemian society. “The Stones came away with a patina of aristocratic decadence that served as a perfect counterfoil to the raw roots blues of their music,” Faithfull explained; a move that “transformed the Stones from pop stars into cultural icons”.
Pallenberg had first met the Stones backstage at a gig in Munich in 1965. Having followed them to their next show in Berlin, she embarked on a sometimes violent relationship with Brian Jones, whom she left two years later for Keith Richards. She and Richards set up home in London and remained together until 1980, a union that produced three children, one of whom died in infancy. During their time together, which included lengthy struggles with heroin addiction, Pallenberg continued the acting career that had started with 1967’s A Degree Of Murder, for which Jones devised the score. She menaced Jane Fonda as The Great Tyrant in Barbarella, played Nurse Bullock in sci-fi sex farce Candy and, in 1970, starred opposite Mick Jagger in the controversial crime drama Performance. She and Jagger were rumoured to have had an affair during filming.
In 1994, Pallenberg earned a degree in fashion and textiles at Central Saint Martins and, four years later, resumed her movie career with the Francis Bacon biopic, Love Is The Devil.