flamboyant artist, novelist and fashion editor

In 1987, at the age of 55, when her pregnant daughter told her she would not trust her with her grandchild, she became teetotal and (mostly) celibate for good. Her final one-night stand was with an Australian surfer when she was 73 and he was 23. She renewed her faith in God and, for the first time in decades, began to paint again. Her life did not necessarily become easy or straightforward from then on: in her golden years she faced bankruptcy and moved to the World’s End housing estate in Chelsea, as well as suffering a cancer scare and, in 2019, a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. However, she became a far happier person than she had ever been before. She was a great advocate of her new way of living who trusted in the power of positive thinking and believed in a “new age” kind of spirituality, one which she readily talked about, even giving interviews for Christian magazines.

Despite this dramatic lifestyle change, she never lost her flamboyance. With her exotic hats over a jet-black fringe, Parkin always retained her extraordinary dress sense — that of, as she put it, a “postmenopausal art student” — and still joked, when well into her seventies, that her greatest regret was not bedding the Real Madrid football team when she had the chance. She did, however, claim to have pleasured an entire Welsh rugby team who were “missing their mams” (the figure was later revised to two rugby teams).

Certainly she had extraordinary sexual magnetism. Even during her virginal college days at art school in London and Brighton she was sought after by the most popular lotharios and as a model for art classes (Bridget Riley was the first to ask her to sit for her). “My raw vitality, my vivid gypsy looks,” she explained, “my irreverent humour in the face of authority, these had always ensured ready companionship.”

When she was 22, already working as an art teacher in a secondary modern in Elephant and Castle, in the space of a week she had her first drink and lost her virginity — to the actor James Robertson Justice. Alcohol and sex became inextricable from then on and both she indulged in obsessively. “I was teaching working-class children in the day, opening their eyes to beauty, then out to nightclubs with sugar daddies. Drink turned me from Welsh Puritan to Vamp of the Valleys.”

Although her relationship with Justice, married and more than twice her age, was intense and significant in her development — she considered him her “sexual Svengali” — from almost the outset it was natural for her to have multiple lovers, and, particularly initially, older lovers, such as the former Conservative MP Lennie Plugge. It was only with the death of her father, when she was 24, that she found she was able to break any emotional binds to these wealthy old connoisseurs of her beauty and youth and begin to relish her independence. This was when she met her first husband, Michael Parkin: a public school-educated Oxford graduate, rich and upper-middle class — exactly what her family, who had sacrificed so much for her education, had hoped for her.

Molly Noyle Thomas was born to Rhonwen and Rueben Thomas in 1932 in Pontycymer, a small mining community towards the top of the Garw Valley in south Wales, although her parents moved with some regularity between their native country and London. They were poor but she and her older sister, Sally, grew up with the legend that their grandmother had been born in Craig-y-Nos Castle, which was lost because of the fecklessness of their gambling great-grandfather.

Despite their stern, chapel-going background, both Molly’s parents were eventually alcoholics. Her father, a frustrated painter and writer, would violently beat and then fondle her (something which Molly later attributed to the tempestuous relationships with the men in her life). Her closeness to her mother, a depressive reliant on alcohol and pills, whose suicide attempts and mental health problems preyed on her daughter’s own nerves, only developed in later years.

When she was seven she was rushed to hospital with acute mastoiditis, which left her permanently deaf in one ear. Her convalescence took months and she was placed in a home in Yarmouth, which she described as one of “Dickensian horror”. There she had had to endure physical and mental misery, which made her tougher and yet more prone to rely on her own imaginative world.

After the Second World War broke out she was saved from the institution by being sent to live with her loving grandparents in Wales. Her grandmother died in 1942 and she moved to live with her parents, who by this time owned a shop in Dollis Hill. She was bright, passed her 11-plus and was even singled out as Oxbridge material. Her parents moved to Streatham and, in 1949, she won a county award to go to art school for five years and started at Goldsmiths College in New Cross. She commuted every day, looking after her parents’ shop in the evenings.

When her parents moved to Brighton to open a bed and breakfast, she moved with them. After a couple of years at Brighton College of Art and the heart-breaking end of her already third engagement — this time to a Jewish man who, to the relief of her antisemitic father, had returned to his home in South Africa — she began work as a teacher in London.

She met Parkin at a party and he proposed to her on their second date. She accepted immediately, despite it meaning she would give up her work. Her colleagues were disappointed — for the first time their pupils had their work on display in national exhibitions and Molly had just been offered a position as art department head in a school in Camberwell.

The newlywed couple moved to Germany, where Michael was posted as an officer in the army, but Parkin was miserable and insisted they return for the birth of their first daughter, Sarah. Their second daughter, Sophie, arrived two and a half years later.

Back in England her husband became an art dealer and she a successful artist: her grand canvases were the bestselling paintings in Liberty’s art department in Regent Street. She was featured in Tatler and Vogue and had sell-out exhibitions. She was extremely productive — which made her sudden and prolonged artistic block all the more dramatic.

On the day she threw her husband out, seven years into their marriage, when one of his many suspected infidelities finally had yielded some hard evidence — a Carlton Hotel bill which was enough to secure for her a divorce, the house and custody of their two daughters in 1964 — her desire to create left her. Despite the hedonistic lifestyle for which she would become known, “she believed that if you had agreed to a bond — the bond of marriage — then you should both be in that bond together,” said Sophie.

Her drinking, which already provided regular entertainment for her fashionable Chelsea friends, took on new momentum and she became more hard-nosed.

In part through sheer brazenness, Parkin now established herself as one of the country’s leading fashion editors. Her rich social life had led to an introduction to Clive Irving, a key figure at IPC, the publishers of the recently launched woman’s magazine Nova. When they met she had mentioned that, now that she had ceased being able to paint, she was applying her eye for colour to fashion, making hats and bags for Hulanicki at Biba. She and a friend eventually decided to open up a small fashion boutique of their own. Just off the King’s Road, it was called The Shop in Radnor Walk.

And so Parkin became fashion editor for Nova. During this period Irving was one of her three regular lovers. The other two were the architect Cedric Price and the playwright Anthony Shaffer. Shaffer would pop round after he had dropped his children off at school, Irving and Parkin would spend their lunch-breaks together, and Price, her favourite, would spend the night. John Mortimer (who enjoyed being spanked) was another conquest, and there were also liaisons with the actor John Thaw and the musicians Bo Diddley and George Melly.

She had natural flair for creating the most daring and original fashion pages, with her undeniable confidence making up for her self-confessed inexperience. Her budgets spiralled out of control, but they were made up by her awards, including fashion editor of the year in 1971. However, in the eyes of her employers, she eventually overstepped the mark and she left the fashion world for good in 1974 with a sense of relief. By this time, having been forced to pen the words for her pages, she had discovered a joy in writing. Now she no longer needed to be constrained in what she wrote: fiction was the next move.

She and her new husband, the artist Patrick Hughes, whom she had met on a photography course he had been teaching and had married in 1970, moved to Cornwall. She found she could churn out a book in just a few weeks and settled on writing that which she enjoyed to read: “Romps in the same tradition as the seaside postcards of Donald McGill and the paintings of Beryl Cook.” The first of these, Love All, was an instant hit. Write Up, about a highly sexed fashion editor, was similarly autobiographical.

Cornwall meant a far slower pace of life. She was tired of the celebrity she had earned herself through chat-show appearances and gossip columns. She and Hughes lived in a converted barn on a remote cliff top between St Ives and Pendeen. At first they were blissfully happy, but alcohol was tightening its grip over Parkin’s life. Together she and Hughes needed no encouragement, but, after almost ten years in a claustrophobic little idyll, their marriage began to feel the strain.

In 1979 they left for New York to live in the Chelsea Hotel, in an attempt to inject life into their relationship. For a year they indulged in drunken, drug-fuelled debauchery. Parkin sent back titillating reports to men’s magazines and tabloids of orgies and celebrity decadence. On their return to England, they separated. Parkin had returned to be close to her mother, who was beginning to show signs of dementia and died in 1984.

By this time Parkin herself was on a serious decline. She was drinking constantly, had begun hallucinating and was increasingly having amnesic blackouts.

Nevertheless, she was invited to star in her own one-woman show, regaling audiences with her crude poems (she had published an anthology, Purple Passages, in 1979) and bawdy anecdotes. As with all her careers, she took to it naturally and was popular, but the drink caught up with this job too — eventually she was even banned from the Dublin stage for being too drunk.

After this misery came to a head and she joined her first alcoholics self-help group, her life changed once and for all. She embraced veganism, explored her spirituality and discovered her “psychic side”. Now sober, she published her autobiography Moll and was offered radio and television work again, hosting her own show for BBC Wales and becoming an agony aunt for TV Quick magazine.

She began to paint again, to the delight of her daughters, who both survive her (Sarah is an NGO consultant and former theatre producer and stage manager; Sophie is an artist, writer and curator). And in 2012 she was given the rare honour of a civil list pension for her services to the arts; previous recipients included Lord Byron, William Wordsworth and James Joyce (“All very badly behaved people,” she mused). Most of all though, Parkin devoted her final years to doting on her grandchildren and became a great-grandmother last year.

In 2017 she expressed surprise at having outlived many of her celebrity friends and lovers. “I know that they are up there looking down and waiting. It’s like there is a lament: ‘For god’s sake Moll, when are you coming? We’re having a big party ready for you here’.”

Molly Parkin, fashion editor, novelist and artist, was born on February 3, 1932. She died on January 5, 2026, aged 93