Margaux Hemingway

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American fashion model, actress, and member of noted family. Hemingway was the granddaughter of American novelist Ernst Hemingway. In the mid '70s, Hemingway was at the peak of her modeling career with a $1 million contract for Faberge's "Babe" perfume line. She was 6ft tall and had a beautiful smile shown on the cover of Time magazine. The daughter of outdoorsman John Hemingway, Margaux grew up in her hometown of Ketchum, Idaho with her two sisters, a good sportswoman. She quarreled with her mother, had a bad habit of lying and her emotions exploded into violent temper and mood swings. At 19, Margaux went to work for a public relations firm in Idaho for Evel Knievel. In 1974, she went to New York on public relations business where she met her future husband, Errol Weston. Weston, a businessman and 14 years her senior romanced the naive country girl. She left Idaho to move into his apartment in New York City. Weston introduced her to the modeling agencies and soon she began to grace the covers of fashion magazines. Photographer Francesco Scavullo helped to launch Hemingway as an international supermodel. In 1976, she made her film debut in Dino De Laurentiis's bomb "Lipstick." Her kid sister Mariel, at 14, played her young sister in the movie and received good reviews which hurt Margaux. Mariel continued to work in films such as Woody Allen's "Manhattan" while Margaux's career faded under the lights of New York's Studio 54. Hemingway went club-hopping with the celebrity crowd of Halston and Liza Minnelli. She learned how to drink and party hard from night to morning. In 1981, she made a documentary film on the life of her grandfather, Ernst, with his travels in Spain, Cuba and the U.S. In the '80s, Hemingway lived in Europe and made three Italian films. In 1987, she moved back to New York City to try to revive her career. She married businessman Errol Weston in Paris in 1975. She was the breadwinner in the marriage while her husband generously spent the money, giving her bad investment advice. Unstable, overweight, drinking too much and feeling that her career was not progressing, she contemplated suicide. The couple divorced in 1977. She married French filmmaker, Bernard Foucher in 1979. He encouraged his wife to help him make a film on the travels of her grandfather. During the shooting of the documentary in 1981, Hemingway continued to drink heavily and slide further down the road to alcoholism. She fired her husband during the filming of the movie, and they divorced in 1986. An epileptic, Hemingway suffered seizures and injuries. In 1986, she experienced a seizure in the women's room at the Miami airport. Christmas of 1986, she sustained injuries after a terrible ski accident in Austria. She cracked her vertebrae, pelvic bone and burst her bladder. It took her nine months in London to recover from her injuries. While there, she drank two bottles of wine daily. Her alcoholism grew worse as she added 35 pounds to her six foot figure. She was admitted to the Betty Ford clinic in Ranch Mirage, CA in 1987 to cope with her alcoholism and obesity. Her destructive pattern reached critical mass in 1991 with bulimia, alcohol and financial debts over $800,000. She had many bouts of clinical depression and in late 1994, enrolled in a psychiatric hospital. She was last seen alive on 6/27/1996, in Santa Monica, CA. Her body was found in an apartment that she had moved into three weeks earlier, and her death certificate gives her date of death as July 1, 1996, a suicide by drug overdose, in Los Angeles. Link to Wikipedia biography