- Spotlight - A CABARET OF HER OWN " 'Marisa Berenson: A Life in Pictures' (edited by Steven Meisel and published this month by Rizzoli) is a dazzling celebration of the woman described by French ELLE magazine as 'the most beautiful girl in the world.'
Tilda Swinton shrewdly defined Berenson's beguiling loveliness when she noted that she 'brings with her a cinematic DNA of Kubrick and Visconti.'
Her refined aristocrat in Luchino Visconti's 'Death in Venice' and her Gainsborough heroine in Stanley Kubrick's BARRY LYNDON are her defining movie roles of the 70s. Along with another admired movie of the period - Bob Fosse's 'Cabaret,' in which she played a Jewish heiress - they proved to skeptics that the international fashion model could act.
Her family DNA is also extraordinary. Her father was an American diplomat and industrialist; her mother - known by the Beckettian nickname 'Gogo' - was born a countess and bacame a marchesa; her great-uncle was celebrated art historian Bernard Berenson; and her maternal grandmother was the iconic fashion designer and muse to the French Surrealists, Elsa Schiaparelli.
But life for Berenson has not always been gilded. Her adored sister, Berry, died on September 11, 2001, when her hijacked plane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. That terrible day, Marisa was flying to New York from Paris when her plane was diverted to Newfoundland. There, she learned the news by phone from her daughter.
'No words have been invented,' says Marisa. " - JOHN HEILPERN, VANITY FAIR, November 2011, page 161
