Marisa Berenson

Marisa Berenson has spent a good portion of her time on this planet being photographed, whether as a model playing muse to the likes of Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Steven Meisel, Helmut Newton, and Irving Penn, or as an actress appearing in films such as Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971), Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972), and Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), or as a woman whose very life has unfolded like a transatlantic cinematic narrative filled with lots of high glamour, dramatic twists, and tragic turns. So there was no shortage of material to mine in compiling the new book,Marisa Berenson: A Life in Pictures (Rizzoli), a sweeping visual biography due out next month. The book traces Berenson’s journey: from growing up as the daughter of U.S. diplomat Robert L. Berenson and countess Gogo Schiaparelli in the substantial—and at times difficult—orbit of her grandmother, the legendary designer Elsa Schiaparelli; to her move to New York to pursue a career in modeling under the tutelage of Diana Vreeland and the iconic image of her that graced the covers of magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar,Time, and even Interview; to her forays into film; to her emergence as the definitive “girl of the ’70s,” as Yves Saint Laurent once referred to her, as she became a pop personality who transcended fashion, film, and even the pixie dust of her famous lineage. But as much as Berenson’s very public life shaped the world’s image of her, what was happening behind the scenes in her private life shaped the woman she has become, including the death of her father, which drove her to seek out a new kind of independence, the birth of her daughter, Starlite Randall—the product of her brief marriage in the mid-’70s to first husband James Randall—and the loss of her younger sister, the photographer Berry Berenson, who was aboard one of the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

Today, at 64, Berenson is easily recognizable as the girl in those earlier images with tawny skin and bright doe eyes. She’s still acting, and appeared in Luca Guadagnino’s Academy Award–nominated, multi-generational epic I Am Love.