Anita Pallenberg (born January 25, 1944) is a model, actress and fashion designer. She was the common-law wife of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards from 1967 to 1979.
Pallenberg was born in Rome, the daughter of an Italian artist and a German secretary. She became fluent in four languages at an early age and as a teenager, she studied medicine, picture restoration and graphic design. Before settling in London, she lived in Germany, Rome and New York City, where she was involved with the Living Theater (starring in the play Paradise Now, which featured nudity on stage) and Andy Warhol's Factory. She is a naturalised US citizen.
Pallenberg is known for her romantic involvement with Rolling Stones band members Brian Jones, whom she met in 1965 in Munich where she was working on a modelling assignment, and Keith Richards, for whom she left Jones in 1967 whilst on a holiday in Morocco. There were rumours that she also had a brief affair with Mick Jagger during the filming of Performance, a movie in which she acted and co-wrote the script. Pallenberg strongly denied the affair in March 2007 when Performance was released on DVD. Pallenberg and Richards had three children, a son born on 10 August 1969 named Marlon, a daughter, Angela (nee Dandelion) born on 17 April 1972 and another boy, Tara, who was born in 1976, but died of health complications soon after birth.
Pallenberg's influence over the development and presentation of the Rolling Stones from the late sixties throughout the seventies was significant and has been documented in many publications on the band during this period and afterwards. She played an unusual role in the male dominated world of rock and roll in the late sixties, acting as much more than just a groupie or wife of a band member. She was indeed, often referred to as "The Sixth Stone". There are published anecdotes that her opinion was so grudgingly respected by Mick Jagger that tracks on Beggars Banquet were brought back into the studio and remixed when Pallenberg found them wanting just weeks before the official release date. In the 2002 compilation release of Forty Licks, Pallenberg is credited as singing background vocals on "Sympathy for the Devil". Besides her influence over the Stones' musical content, her interest in the occult was a featured style component that marked the Stones concerts and public presentation throughout the decade that she was the common-law companion of Richards. Tony Sanchez's recounting of his time as Richard’s body guard and drug dealer is replete with vignettes of Pallenberg’s strange spiritual practices.
She shared many of her husband's vices and was in fact charged first in the 1977 Toronto heroin arrest that almost destroyed the Rolling Stones. A warrant for her arrest was the reason police came to search Richards and Pallenberg's hotel rooms; she would plead guilty to marijuana possession, and be fined, several weeks after her common-law husband's headline grabbing arrest. The relationship between Richards and Pallenberg waned after Richards cleaned up under threat of imprisonment and he stated in a 1981 Rolling Stone magazine interview that his lawyers told the couple to separate, or they would end up in more serious trouble. Yet Richards also stated that he still loved Anita and saw her as much as he ever did, despite his budding devotion to his future wife Patti Hansen. In a 1985 Rolling Stone magazine interview, Mick Jagger claimed that Pallenberg "nearly killed me," when he was asked whether the Rolling Stones had any responsibility for the personal drug addictions of people close to the band, like Marshall Chess, John Phillips and Pallenberg. Nevertheless, Richards continued to welcome Pallenberg to family events and concert tours, where she often accompanies her children and grandchildren and reportedly is close friends with Patti Hansen. Singer Marianne Faithfull was also Jagger's girlfriend during late 1960s, and remains a great friend of Pallenberg's. They appeared together in the fourth series (2001) of the BBC-TV/Comedy Central/Saunders and French production of Absolutely Fabulous in episode four "Donkey", with Marianne Faithfull playing "God" and Anita Pallenberg "The Devil" in a dream sequence experienced by Jennifer Saunders' character of Edina Monsoon.
In 1979, a seventeen year old boy, Scott Cantrell, shot himself in the head in Pallenberg's bed with a gun owned by Keith Richards, in the home shared by Richards and Pallenberg in South Salem, New York. The youth had been employed as a part-time groundskeeper at the estate and was involved with Pallenberg in an intimate relationship. Richards was in Paris recording with the Rolling Stones, but his son was present in the home when the teenager killed himself. Pallenberg was arrested but the death was ruled as a suicide in 1980, despite rumours that Pallenberg and Cantrell had been playing a game of Russian Roulette with the gun. The police investigation confirmed that Pallenberg was not in the room or on the same floor of the home when the fatal shot was fired.
Pallenberg has appeared in more than a dozen films over a forty year span. Most notably, she appeared as The Black Queen in Roger Vadim's cult-classic sci-fi film Barbarella, the sleeper wife of Michel Piccoli in the film Dillinger Is Dead, directed by Marco Ferreri. She had a small part in Micheal Kohlhass der Rebell which was filmed in Morocco in 1969 and the 1970 avant-garde Performance in which she played the memorable role of "Pherber" (actually filmed in 1968 but controversially not released for two years). She appeared in a documentary about the Rolling Stones in 1968, Sympathy for the Devil directed by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, as well as Cocksucker Blues the unreleased documentary film directed by Robert Frank chronicling The Rolling Stones' North American tour in 1972. Recently, in an interview, Anita related her encounters in Rome in 1960, while La Dolce Vita was happening, with legendary Italian filmakers such as Federico Fellini, Alberto Moravia, Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In 1985 for the video of "Wild Boys" Duran Duran used the clip of Anita from Barbarella. Recently, Pallenberg has been portrayed in popular film and television. The actress Monet Mazur played a young Pallenberg in the 2005 film Stoned, a biographical film about Brian Jones during the last year of his life. In a 2006 episode of the NBC television Show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip character Harriet Hayes is hired to play Pallenberg in a film. That story line is extended and in a further episode, Harriet is seen playing Pallenberg and filming the Russian Roulette version of Cantrell's suicide. However, it is pointed out on numerous occasions that the director is allowing himself some creative license and that Pallenberg was properly cleared of any involvement in Cantrell's suicide.
Pallenberg became a fashion designer during the 1990s, after four years at London's St. Martins School of Art and Design. She now divides her time between New York City and Europe, and sporadically appears in public as a party DJ.
