Susan Elliott, who has died aged 65, had an open marriage for 30 years with Denholm Elliott, the actor, who lived a secret double life as a promiscuous bisexual until his death from Aids in 1992.
She was a 19-year-old actress in 1961 when Elliott proposed. He was 20 years older, and his first brief marriage to Virginia McKenna had ended in divorce. They had met in New York, at the Strollers' Club on 53rd Street in midtown Manhattan, where Susan Robinson, as she then was, was working as a singing waitress.
It was an unlikely pairing. Susan was an American convent girl, while Elliott, a louche and very English thespian, admitted at the outset to having had male lovers. While she came from a patrician family of writers, he was a chronically insecure actor, a star of The Cruel Sea (1953), whose career, he thought, was on the slide.
A year later they married in London and enjoyed an extended European honeymooon driving through France in Elliott's Mercedes SL 190 convertible, via Barcelona, to Ibiza, then something of a celebrity playground.
The couple found a plot of land on a hillside outside Santa Eulalia, built their own idyllic villa there and stayed for 30 years.
Nearly 10 years into her marriage Susan knew Denholm was bisexual, when he returned from shooting Too Late The Hero (1970) and confessed to having participated in various orgies on location with men as well as women, and suggesting she attend a clap clinic for a protective shot "just to be on the safe side".
On visits to London, the couple were regular fixtures at bohemian drinking clubs. On one outing to the Colony Room with the artist Francis Bacon and his boyfriend John Edwards, Susan Elliott was handcuffed to a barstool by Edwards, who went off home without unlocking her. She made her way back to north London and managed to get into bed beside her husband without disturbing him, concealing the stool by her side of the bed.
Denholm Elliott set off for filming the next morning none the wiser, and she then hailed another cab to take her to Bacon's studio in Reece Mews, where she was released, and then taken for lunch to Wheeler's, by her captors.
Susan Robinson was born on March 7 1942 in Cleveland, where her grandfather had edited the Plain Dealer newspaper, and was raised in Washington DC. Her manic depressive father was a journalist on Time and later Newsweek magazines, her mother the daughter of a well-off Southern Catholic family. She attended the Sacred Heart Academy in Washington where the nuns, ignoring her wish to learn languages, noted her skill at basketball and made her captain of the school team.
Susan's appetite for show business had been whetted by attendance at recordings of such television shows as Saturday Night Jamboree and Record Hoppers. After modest success as an actress in Riders to the Sea (for which she won an award as Best Supporting Newcomer), her father enrolled her at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.
The city held no fear for Susan, who had been beaten up in Washington by a gang of eight girls and a boy, leaving her with scars on her face and crowns on her teeth.Her engagement to Denholm Elliott made the New York gossip columns, Elliott himself scrambling to place a call to her father at daybreak in the hope that he not yet opened his morning paper.
When the play he was in finally closed, the couple married in London, where the diary pages had already trailed the actor's nuptials to a "devastating 20 year old, slender Susan Robinson".
She recalled the first few years of her marriage during the 1960s as "a whirlwind of parties, films, touring and babies"; with children and later a nanny in tow, Susan shuttled between Ibiza, London and America in order to be with her husband.
There were sadnesses, too: her father committed suicide by jumping off the 28th floor of the Manhattan Towers, and she lost twin children at birth. Two more children were born prematurely, a son, Mark, who as a child suffered serious illness and growth problems, and a daughter, Jennifer, who later hanged herself having become hooked on drugs.
When Denholm Elliott first confessed to attending orgies, Susan instinctively declared the marriage over and the couple agreed to a trial separation. But on the flight home, she decided to try again, and within a week they had patched their relationship up.
Back in Ibiza, his affairs continued, his taste running to the exotic, including Chinese waiters, Moroccan gigolos, Spanish garage attendants, Barbadian shop assistants, even a hunchbacked Haitian dwarf.
Susan had long since become reconciled to her husband's boyfriends, and seldom felt jealous, except on one occasion where he followed one of them, a young Moroccan, to London; as a gesture of defiance she enjoyed a fleeting affair with a French actor holidaying on the island, and was reassured to find herself still attractive and desirable, and with no feeling of guilt. Her own sex life with her husband remained active. "Between us," she remembered, "he was always 100 percent masculine, both in bed and in taking decisions in our home life."
For his part, Denholm Elliott never inhibited Susan's own affairs ("as long as you don't fall in love and as long as you don't have anyone else's baby"), mainly because, as he himself explained, it made him feel less guilty about his own indiscretions.
These increased in number and frequency as the years passed until, as Susan noted in her revealing biography Denholm Elliott, Quest For Love (1994), her husband's promiscuity became "almost a psychological disorder".
In 1987 Elliott told her he had tested HIV positive. Having just bought Sandy's Bar on Ibiza, they hurriedly sold the business on, but in London five years later Susan decided that she wanted him to die on the island and she emptied her bank account to hire a private jet for him. He died at his villa on Ibiza in October 1992 aged 70.
In his memory, Susan Elliott established a hotel complex on Ibiza called Can Bufi, where people who are HIV positive could enjoy a free holiday, subsidised by 16 paying guests.
Susan Elliott died in a fire at her home in London on April 12. She is survived by her son, her twin brother and a sister.
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