Keith Richards’ former lover and mother to three of his kids Anita Pallenberg dies aged 73
The Sixties icon got together with the Rolling Stones guitarist behind the back of his bandmate Brian Jones in 1967
KEITH Richards' ex-girlfriend Anita Pallenberg died last night aged 73.
The Italian-German actress is survived by the former couple's children, Marlon, 47 and Angela, 45.
Her good friend Stella Schnabel shared a picture of her and Anita on Instagram and wrote: "I have never met a woman quite like you Anita. I don't think there is anybody in this universe like you. No one has ever understood me so well. You showed about life and myself and how to grow and become and exist with it all.
"I was a little girl thinking I was big but I became a woman through knowing you. The secret lyrical you. My best friend. The greatest woman I have ever known. Thank you for the most important lessons - because they are ever changing and definitive. Like you. We are all singing for you, how you liked it.
"Go in peace my Roman mother, you will always be in my heart."
Anita and Keith's troubled relationship was documented in the Rolling Stones guitarist's autobiography Life.
The colourful memoir told how the couple got together behind the back of Stones guitarist Brian Jones, who was in abusive relationship with Anita at the time.
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Jones and Richards' relationship would never recover and played a big part in the latter's departure from the band - the guitarist would be found drowned in a swimming pool two years later in 1969.
There was further tragedy when Anita and Keith's third child, Tara, was found dead in his cot at just 10 weeks old in 1976.
Anita and Keith lived a hedonistic lifestyle full of booze and drugs, which eventually ruined there relationship once and for all.
However, in an interview with in 2008, Anita didn't regard that period in her life as a waste.
She explained: "I don't think they were lost years. I went about doing what I did, travelling anyway, even if sometimes they had to carry me. Self-medication they call it now. I went into this - what do they call it before you become a butterfly? - cocoon for a long time. And in a way it's kept me probably more childlike; that's what drugs do to people, they stop emotional growth, so when you come out of it you're kind of 17."
It was her love of music which first attracted her to Brian and then the Stones all those decades ago.
She said: "I've always loved the blues and Brian especially was a real blues man. It was more than just pop. I thought they were great, you know. In those days. Now I'm not so sure! Somebody like Keith, he's got a future because he can sit up like a blues man until he's 90, he can just strum his guitar and sing his songs and people will always listen; but all this pop stuff, I'm not really interested."
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