Anita Pallenberg (6 April 1944 – 13 June 2017) was an Italian-German actress and model. A style icon and "It Girl" of the 1960s and '70s, Pallenberg was credited as the muse of The Rolling Stones; she was the romantic partner of multi-instrumentalist and guitarist Brian Jones, and later, from 1967 to 1980, the partner of Stones guitarist Keith Richards, with whom she had three children. Pallenberg was born on 6 April 1944 in German-occupied Rome, the daughter of Arnold "Arnaldo" Pallenberg, an ethnic German Italian sales agent, amateur singer and hobbyist painter, and Paula Wiederhold, a German embassy secretary. The family was separated because of the war, and she did not see her father until she was 3 years old. Her father later sent her to a boarding school in Germany to help her master the language. She became fluent in four languages at an early age.She was expelled from school when she was 16, after which she spend time in Rome with the Dolce Vita crowd, and then went to New York City to hang out with Andy Warhol's Factory crowd. She then began her career as a fashion model in Paris. She studied medicine, picture restoration and graphic design without achieving a degree. Before settling in London, she lived in Germany, in her native Rome, as well as in New York City, where she was involved with the Living Theatre, starring in the play Paradise Now, which featured onstage nudity, and Andy Warhol's Factory.
Pallenberg appeared in over a dozen films over a 40-year span. One of her first appearances was as The Great Tyrant in Roger Vadim's science fiction film Barbarella (1968) (although the character's voice was dubbed by Joan Greenwood,) and as the sleeper wife of Michel Piccoli in the film Dillinger Is Dead (1969), directed by Marco Ferreri.[8] She also had roles in the German crime thriller A Degree of Murder (1967) which featured music by Brian Jones, the cult film Candy (1968) as James Coburn's possessive nurse, Volker Schlöndorff's Michael Kohlhaas – Der Rebell (1969) which was filmed in Slovakia, and the avant-garde Performance (1970) in which she played the role of Pherber. The film was shot in 1968, but a nervous studio delayed its release.Pallenberg appeared in a documentary about the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil (1968), directed by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. In a March 2007 interview, she related her encounters in Rome while La Dolce Vita (1960) was being filmed, with its director Federico Fellini, other filmmakers such as Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and with the novelist Alberto Moravia In 1985, for the video of "Wild Boys", Duran Duran used a clip of Pallenberg from Barbarella. She portrayed "The Queen" in the comedy-drama Mister Lonely by Harmony Korine, and played a character named Sin in Go Go Tales (both 2007).
In the 1990s, Pallenberg returned to education to study fashion. She graduated from Central Saint Martins in London in 1994 with a fashion and textile degree. However, she decided not to forge ahead with a career in fashion, finding it too cutthroat and cruel. Pallenberg has been portrayed several times by other performers. Monet Mazur played a young Pallenberg in the film Stoned (2005), a biographical film about the last year of Brian Jones' life, while the NBC television show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (2006) included a story arc in which the character Harriet Hayes was hired to play Pallenberg in a film.In 1979, a 17-year-old boy, Scott Cantrell, shot himself in the head in Pallenberg's bed with a gun owned by Keith Richards, while at the South Salem, New York house shared by Richards and Pallenberg. The youth had been employed as a part-time groundsman at the estate and was involved in relationship with Pallenberg. Richards was in Paris recording with the Rolling Stones, but his son was at the house when the teen killed himself. Pallenberg was arrested; however, the death was ruled a suicide in 1980, despite rumours that Pallenberg and Cantrell had been playing a game of Russian roulette. The police investigation stated that Pallenberg was not on the same floor of the house at the time the fatal shot was fired.
