Anita Pallenberg, Original Rock Goddess, Finally Gets Her Own Spotlight

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Anita Pallenberg was one of the mid-20th century's most influential It girls. The Italian-born beauty's looks took her all over the world as a model in the 1960s, and led to her meeting—and besotting—several Rolling Stones, inspiring such songs as "You Can't Always Get What You Want," and "Gimme Shelter." At the same time, the magnetic muse was also making her mark in movies like Barbarella and Performance. But life for a woman who was variously described as a "rock-and-roll goddess," an "evil seductress," and a "wild child"—that last one, Pallenberg called herself—was more complicated than any of those labels would imply.

The intimate, insidery new documentary Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg, directed by Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill, offers a fuller appraisal. Pallenberg was a Catholic high school dropout, who moved to New York City at age 21, speaking little English. She nevertheless charmed her way into the downtown pop art scene—washing brushes for Jasper Johns, meeting Andy Warhol, and attending a party where Allen Ginsberg collected famous people's pubic hair. Eventually, she'd couple up with Stones guitarist Brian Jones before settling down with his bandmate, Keith Richards, and having three children with him.

"She had a funny, weird, crazy, wonderful chemistry inside of her that took her to adventure and misadventure in equal quantity," says Bloom, the Emmy-nominated filmmaker behind Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds and Divide and Conquer. "She was fiercely intelligent—she certainly didn't coast by on her beauty. I think she found beauty kind of boring."

The directors discovered their mutual interest in Pallenberg at a prepandemic holiday party at Alex Gibney's company Jigsaw Productions, where they both worked. Bloom had just met with Pallenberg and Richards's son Marlon about a possible film focused on his mother; Zill, a veteran documentary producer, was reading Richards's 2010 autobiography, Life. "It felt like this very strange kismet, and so I basically just chased Alexis until she brought me on to the project officially," Zill says.

Their film's deep confessional detail comes courtesy of a work-in-progress memoir that Marlon and his children found while going through his mother's papers after she died in 2017. Excerpts from her notes and drafts are read by Scarlett Johansson (sans Pallenberg's pan-European accent), accompanied by commentary from Richards, the couple's daughter, Angela (née "Dandelion") Richards, plus never-before-seen Super-8 home movies, and personal photographs that were matched to actual events when possible. The family affair also features insights from Pallenberg pals like singer Marianne Faithfull, director Volker Schlöndorff, and model Kate Moss. (Mick Jagger wasn't asked to participate, although the film suggests that he, too, fell for the free-spirited Pallenberg at one point—and Faithful, Jagger's then girlfriend, agrees.)

Life for Pallenberg amped up considerably after she met the Stones at a 1965 Munich concert. There, she instantly connected with Jones (we see photos of that backstage moment). Not long after, they set up house in London. But Pallenberg says in the film that when his violent abuse and increasing drug use became too much, she fell into Richards's welcoming arms.

"For some reason, she found me as mysterious and as attractive as I found her," the now 80-year-old musician remembers in the film. Though he was "bursting in love" with the woman he would write "You've Got the Silver" for, Richards says he never quite understood what she saw in him. "Basically, I was trying to keep up with her," he laughs. For her part, Pallenberg says in the doc that the shy Richards offered "a different kind of love than I was used to, and it was a good time in my life."

Pallenberg and Keith Richards with their children.Reg Lancaster/Getty Images.