NEW YORK, United States (AFP) — Anita Pallenberg, the globe-trotting actress and model who was best known as part of a love triangle within The Rolling Stones, has died, friends said Wednesday. She was 73.
Pallenberg, who long struggled with drugs and alcohol, died Wednesday of unspecific causes, actress and friend Stella Schnabel announced on Instagram.
Born in Rome to ethnically German parents, Pallenberg had an itinerant youth as she moved to New York to mingle in Andy Warhol’s avant-garde art circles before heading to Paris to work as a model.
She eventually landed cinema roles, most notably “Barbarella,” the 1968 science-fiction film about a future world government starring Jane Fonda.
She would become called an unofficial member of The Rolling Stones, a rare woman in the studio who offered her input on the direction of the 1968 album “Beggars Banquet.”
She met the Stones in 1965 when she offered them hashish backstage before a concert in Munich, where she was on a modeling assignment.
She soon began a two-year relationship with Brian Jones, the Stones guitarist who was the initial leader of the band.
“Then he turned into a kind of schizo. He got aggressive and abusive,” Pallenberg said of Jones in an interview with the now defunct magazine Cheap Date.
On a vacation in Morocco in 1967, fellow Stones guitarist Keith Richards spotted Jones beating Pallenberg, she later recounted. She left Jones — who would die in 1969 — and became the girlfriend of Richards with whom she had three children, one of whom died in infancy.
“A most remarkable woman. Always in my heart,” Richards, who remained friendly with Pallenberg after their relationship ended in the late 1970s, wrote on Twitter.
Pallenberg, who would go on long drug and alcohol binges, sobered up in the late 1980s. She divided time between London and Jamaica and embarked on various projects, including importing textiles from India, but largely kept a low profile.
She told The Guardian in 2008 that she decided not to write an autobiography, saying she spoke to several publishers and “they all wanted salacious.”
Singer Marianne Faithfull, who was involved in the late 1960s with Stones frontman Mick Jagger, described Pallenberg as a lifelong friend in a tribute on Facebook.
“She taught me so much, especially after we got clean; it was very good, and so much fun! Farewell my love, go well.”
© Agence France-Presse
