Talitha Getty, Bohemian queen may not have been well known by the public, but her presence in the London scene and abundance of famous friends like Mick Jagger, Diane von Fursenberg, and Yves Saint Laurent made her a muse and icon.

She was an actress of Dutch extraction, born in the former Dutch East Indies, who was regarded as a style icon of the late 1960s. She lived much of her adult life in Britain and, in her final years, was closely associated with the Moroccan city of Marrakesh. Her husband was the oil heir and subsequent philanthropist John Paul Getty, Jr.

An iconic photograph taken on a roof-top in Marrakesh, Morocco in January 1969 by Patrick Lichfield.

Talitha Getty became the second wife of John Paul Getty (1932-2003), son of the oil tycoon Paul Getty (1892-1976). She and her husband were part of “Swinging” London’s fashionable scene, becoming friends with, among others, singers Mick Jagger, of the Rolling Stones, and his girlfriend Marianne Faithfull. Faithfull and Jagger were invited by the Getty’s to stay with them at their beautiful home in Morocco.  Although, in her lifetime, Talitha Getty, who was only thirty when she died, was not much known to a wider public, fashion gurus of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have often written of her and Marrakesh (a major destination for hippies in the late 1960s, as illustrated by the song, “Marrakesh Express” (1969) by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young) as virtually synonymous. The home was filled with lush, green palms and tiled with gorgeous mosaics.

Yves Saint Laurent described the Gettys as:
lying on a starlit terrace in Marrakesh, beautiful and damned and a whole generation assembled as if for eternity where the curtain of the past seemed to lift before an extraordinary future.

She died of a heroin overdose in Rome, within the same twelve month period as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Edie Sedgwick and Jim Morrison, other cultural icons of the 1960s.