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Here’s Marianne Faithfull in all her pomp, half dressed for an evening out in swinging London or perhaps (more hopefully), fully clothed for an evening in!!!

In reality, this portrait – one of a series of twelve taken by noted photographer Terry O’Neill – marks the moment when she went from a country girl to sizzling singing starlet. The collection of photographs went under the hammer in September 2012 at Christie’s auction house, for considerably more money than one of my limited edition prints. No surprise there.

Faithfull may have been the poster girl for unharnessed, carefree sex – forever recalled being discovered during a drugs raid at Keith Richards’s house supposedly wearing nothing but a rabbit-fur rug and clutching a Mars bar – but her appearance in the BBC Tv series “Who Do You Think You Are?” (2013) provided a stark reminder of the chasm between fact and fantasy.

Sadly, throughout her ‘beautiful period,’ she could not tolerate sex without the support of alcohol and drugs; the singer and sometimes actress attributing her “horror of men” to to the war-time experiences of both her Austrian mother, Eva von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso, and her grandmother. Both women were raped by Red Army soldiers during the liberation of Vienna. During her formative years, she would become aware – without comprehending at the time – the ferocious loathing of men that suffused her mother, while her grandmother would turn away from her grandfather, “who really adored her.” All very sad………