Margaux Hemingway

Margaux Louise Hemingway (born Margot Louise Hemingway; February 16, 1954 – July 1, 1996) was an American fashion model and actress.

Margot Louise Hemingway was born February 16, 1954, in Portland, Oregon, the second of three daughters born to Byra Louise (née Whittlesey) and Jack Hemingway (eldest child of writer Ernest Hemingway).

When she learned that she was named after the wine Château Margaux, which her parents drank on the night she was conceived, she changed the spelling from "Margot" to "Margaux" to match.

She had two sisters, actress Mariel Hemingway and Joan (nicknamed Muffet).

During her childhood, the family relocated from Oregon to Cuba, where her grandfather had lived, then to San Francisco, and later to Idaho, where they lived on her grandfather's farm in Ketchum, adjacent to Sun Valley.

The family took trips each summer back to Oregon with the daughters' godmother, who owned a farm in Salem.

She attended the Catlin Gabel School in Portland for her junior year.

Margaux struggled with a variety of disorders beginning in her teenage years, including alcoholism, depression, bulimia, and epilepsy.

With her permission, a video recording was made of her therapy session related to her bulimia, and it was broadcast on television.

She also had dyslexia.

She gained success as a supermodel in the mid-1970s, appearing on the covers of magazines including Cosmopolitan, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, and Time.

She signed a million-dollar contract with Fabergé Inc. as the spokesmodel for Babe perfume.

She was the granddaughter of writer Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway was 6 ft tall and had success as a model, including her million-dollar contract with Fabergé as the spokesmodel for Babe perfume in the 1970s.

This was the first million-dollar contract ever awarded to a fashion model.

During the height of her modeling career in the mid- to late 1970s, Hemingway was a regular attendee of New York City's exclusive discothèque Studio 54, often in the company of such celebrities as Halston, Bianca Jagger, Liza Minnelli, Grace Jones, and Andy Warhol.

At such social mixers, she began to use alcohol and drugs.

She also appeared on the covers of Cosmopolitan, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, and Vogue, as well as on the June 16, 1975, cover of TIME, which dubbed her one of the "new beauties".

The September 1, 1975, cover issue of Vogue called Hemingway "New York's New Supermodel".

Hemingway made her film debut in the Lamont Johnson-directed rape and revenge film Lipstick (1976), alongside her 14-year-old sister Mariel, and Anne Bancroft.

In it, she plays a fashion model who is terrorized by a rapist.

The film's violent depiction of rape led it to be labeled an exploitation film, though in later years it had success as a cult film.

She followed this with a supporting role in the Italian horror film Killer Fish (1979), opposite Lee Majors and Karen Black.

Her following project was the comedy They Call Me Bruce? in 1982.

In 1984, Hemingway had a supporting part in Over the Brooklyn Bridge, opposite Elliott Gould and Shelley Winters.

After a skiing accident in 1984, Hemingway gained 75 lb, ending up at nearly 200 lbs, and became increasingly depressed.

Despite her attempts, Hemingway's budding film career began to falter, and she took roles in several B-movies, including Killing Machine (1984) and Inner Sanctum (1991).

In 1987, she checked into the Betty Ford Center.

In the 1990s, Margaux reported that she had been sexually abused by her father as a child.

Attempting to make a comeback, she appeared on the cover of Playboy in May 1990, and asked the magazine to hire Selig as the creative director for her cover story.

It was shot in Belize.

Hemingway continued to support herself by appearing in a small number of direct-to-video films into the 1990s, autographing her nude photos from Playboy, and endorsing a psychic telephone hotline owned by her cousin, Adiel Hemingway.

Shortly before her death, she was set to host the outdoor adventure series Wild Guide on the Discovery Channel.

Hemingway's first marriage, to Errol Wetson (Wetanson), ended in divorce.

They met when, at age 19, she accompanied her father to the Plaza Hotel in New York City on a business trip.

Her later years were marred by highly publicized episodes of addiction and depression, before her suicide from a drug overdose on July 1, 1996, at the age of 42.

In a 1997 E! True Hollywood Story that profiled Hemingway's life, her mentor and close friend Zachary Selig discussed how he helped launch her early career with his initial marketing and public relations work as she became a global celebrity, and he introduced her to yoga and the Solar Kundalini "Codex Relaxatia" paradigm as tools for success and to overcome some of her debilitating mental disorders.

Selig and Hemingway spent time with the Hemingway family at their property in Ketchum adjacent to Sun Valley, where they studied Solar Kundalini, yoga, and meditation together.

Hemingway continued using these relaxation skills for the rest of her life.

In 2013, her younger sister Mariel said in the documentary Running from Crazy that both Margaux and their older sister Muffet had been sexually abused by their father.