10/01/2026
RIP MOLLY PARKIN
3 Feb 1932 - 5 Jan 2026
PHOTO: FRANCESCO GUIDICINI/CAMERA PRESS
Molly gave Dazed and Confused Magazine this colourful account of her life story in their January 2013 issue at the age of 80:
“I was born in 1932 among what has been referred to in snootier circles as the ‘valley rabble’ in Pontycymmer, a small Welsh mining village.
“I hated it when I had to come to London and my parents settled in Dollis Hill in Willesden. Each road like every other – it depressed the s**te out of me. When I was 17, I won a scholarship to Goldsmiths, and at 19 I went on an art scholarship to Italy, where I saw the Sistine Chapel and the Giottos.
“I was an art student in Sunnyhill Road, in the asbestos hovel that was my dad’s sweet shop. My father was smoking the profits, and the doctor said, ‘You’ve got such a chest you’d benefit from going to Dr Brighton,’ as they called it then. I studied at Brighton School of Art and mixed with people I’d never encountered, middle-class and upper-class girls who’d been to Roedean.
“I moved back to London and everything was on offer. I was introduced to the Colony Room: you had a pianist murmuring songs, low light, luscious drinks and Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon or Colin MacInnes. I had the shock of my life because I’d never seen lived-in faces like that before – people that had really whacked the s**t out of life and were bubbling with the highest spirits. My favourite was Francis Bacon. He told amazing stories. At the Colony Room you had to hold your own conversationally, and that’s what taught me how to cut sentences.
“At the jazz club started by John Minton, a lecturer and painter at the Royal College of Art, I saw Louis Armstrong perform. It stirred something very basic in me. I was introduced and he put his arms around me and whispered, ‘Hi honey, you’re mine for the night.’ I drew back and said, ‘I have to be up in the morning teaching,’ and he kissed me.
“Within that fortnight, James Robertson Justice, a huge film star at the time, rang up and asked me to dinner. I nearly died. There he was in this scarlet, very low sports-car. He took me to the Ivy and had his hand in my knickers the whole way through. That affair was the love of my life really. James taught me to be myself.
“I went to a party where I met my first husband. He was everything my mother asked for, a public schoolboy who studied law at Oxford. I painted at home and sold my work through Liberty – big, modern, splashy paintings that went in the window in the morning and sold by lunchtime.
“It turned out he was a womaniser. I kicked him out on the Sunday, and on Monday morning I picked up the brush and nothing came. The Muse mad departed. So I started making hats and bags for Biba. I opened a Chelsea boutique, painted it black and put on loud music. By the end of the day the queue was all the way up King’s Road.
Then I met my next husband and he said, ‘You’re wasted doing fashion, you should be writing books.’ I said, ‘What should I write about?’ And he said, ‘What do you enjoy most?’ I said, ‘Sex, obviously,’ being in bed and having a laugh. It was a joke, but that first book (Love: All) was a global bestseller because the Times Literary Supplement made fun of it – that review alone ensured its bestsellerdom.
“I ended both my marriages. My auntie took me aside after my second divorce and said, ‘Molly love, you’ve done Wales proud having married two Englishmen and made life for them absolute hell. Well done. You don’t have to do it again now.’
“I did love pubs and boozing, but I ended it in the gutter. I’d been out for a week, still in gold lamé with the maquillage in place, but smudged of course because I’d pleasured I-don’t-know-how-many meat porters at Smithfield. It was 7am, and my granny’s voice came to me: ‘The party’s over now, Molly. You’ve just had your last drink.’ I wish someone else had thought to say it, but I only ever moved among alcoholics. That same week, at 55, I went to my first AA meeting.
“The thing about living to 80 is that so many of my closest friends and lovers are dead. Except I did have that lovely encounter when I was 73 with a 23-year-old surfer. That was my sexual swansong. I’d been in Las Vegas in the Bellagio hotel and it was a lyrical coupling, even though it was in the gents.
“That I received the award from the Queen at Jubilee time in my 80th year for my contribution to the arts is flabbergasting, but then it was given to Wordsworth, Byron and James Joyce, and certainly Augustus John was a filthy old bastard. So I suppose I fit in.
“When people ask, ‘What was your happiest time?’, I say, ‘Now.’ I’ve mellowed.”
https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/23462/1/molly-parkin-the-dynamite-dame
