The “Wicked” Actress Who Transformed The Rolling Stones

A grande dame of British rock, Anita Pallenberg went out with Brian Jones, left him for Keith Richards, and was rumoured to have had an affair with Mick Jagger.

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Anita Pallenberg 1944-2017

Ravishingly beautiful and – as her friend Marianne Faithfull put it – “wicked… hypnotic and unsettling”, she performed backing vocals on Sympathy for the Devil, encouraged Jagger to remix the tracks on Beggars Banquet, and inspired the visceral Gimme Shelter, written by Richards when he believed she was sleeping with Jagger on the set of the film Performance. She was often described as the Stones’ muse, but she was far more than that, said Brooke Mazurek on NPR. The “baddest of the bad girls”, Pallenberg “helped the Stones become the Stones”: she took a gang of awkward young men and “extricated their inner outlaws”.