Artist, writer, socialite and icon of the Swinging Sixties

Molly Parkin, the self-styled 'Chapel girl' renowned for her flamboyant dress sense, foul-mouthed charm and string of famous lovers, lived a truly dazzling life

- Paul Levy

By the time Molly Parkin was in her eighties, she said she had lived in 52 houses.

Such was her lucky streak that she ended up in sheltered council housing in the King's Road at World's End, the location of many of her youthful dalliances and triumphs. Born Molly Thomas in the Welsh Valleys, but brought up in the seedier suburbs of London, she wrote 10 novels and several other books, including a volume of poetry, a collection of her journalism, a cookery book and two memoirs. She accounted herself a good painter “in the Abstract-Expressionist style” and a good writer of “erotic-humorous novels”.

Hers was a familiar face on television from the 1960s well into the 2010s, as well as being known to partygoers and art-world private-view guests. She was always strikingly dressed, never without a hat or her hair wrapped in a turban. Parkin saw herself as a minor celebrity, though a good chunk of her second autobiography, Welcome to Mollywood (2010), consists of comparing her life to Elizabeth Taylor's. She felt that Taylor, born a few weeks after her in February 1932, and she were meant to be “astral twins”, but her mother “skidded on my Auntie Lizzie’s scullery lino” and went into labour early. She listed her similarities with Taylor: “Both beautiful, high-achieving, talented, foulmouthed, alcoholic, overeating, artistic, fag-hag sex-sirens.”