Anita Pallenberg, a model and actress best known for being the muse and long-time girlfriend of two members of the Rolling Stones, has died. Pallenberg, whose 12-year relationship with Keith Richards helped to define the direction of the Stones through the ’60s and ’70s, was 73.
Born in Rome during World War II, Pallenberg first met the band’s members in 1965, encountering its founder, Brian Jones, after a modeling assignment in Germany. The two began a relationship that ended in 1967, after Jones became increasingly unstable; she would later take up with Richards instead, with the two having three children together over the next several years. (Richards later alleged that Pallenberg and Mick Jagger also had a brief relationship during the filming of the heavily Stones-involved film Performance, although the actress stated that the affair never happened.)
A countercultural icon, Pallenberg refused to be boxed into simple roles like “girlfriend” or “groupie” in her relationship with the group. Fellow Stones-adjacent singer Marianne Faithfull credited Pallenberg with transforming the band from well-liked rockers into cultural heroes, writing in her 1994 biography, “She almost single-handedly engineered a cultural revolution in London by bringing together the Stones and the jeunesse dorée…The Stones came away with a patina of aristocratic decadence that served as a perfect counterfoil to the raw roots blues of their music.” Faithful also offers up the following description of her long-time friend: “At the center, like a phoenix on her nest of flames…the wicked Anita….She was the most incredible woman I’d met in my life. Dazzling, beautiful, hypnotic and unsettling. Her smile—those carnivorous teeth!—obliterated everything.”