In bed with Mick Jagger

When the finished cut was screened in Los Angeles it caused one of the Warner executives' wives to throw up, didn't feature Jagger until halfway through and, instead of being the groovy London pop- meets-wisecracking gangland feature that Warner expected, was a homoerotic, sadomasochistic, sexually fuelled, venomous and violent London gangster flick. And so they demanded a re-edit. The resulting reworking of the film, overseen by Cammell (Roeg had gone to Australia to do Walkabout) and performed by Frank Mazzola (a former gang member who showed James Dean exactly how to wield a switchblade in Rebel Without a Cause), employed a series of rapid cuts that, designed to lose much of the offending sex, drugs and violence, gave the film its breakneck pace, upped the tension and revolutionised the art of film-making.

"The movie signalled the end of the hippie era and the end of innocence," asserts Pallenberg. "It was as if the James Fox character personified all these exterior forces that polluted this rather naive world, and things were never quite the same again." Although the film led to other roles, by 1976 Pallenberg had lost interest, as her drug and alcohol abuse spiralled.

But, of late, she has seen her acting career blossom once again. Scheduled for release later this year is the cult director Harmony Korine's eagerly anticipated Mister Lonely, in which she co-stars as the queen of England, while this month she is back in Cinecitta studios in Rome acting in Abel Ferrara's Go Go Tales, starring Willem Dafoe, Bob Hoskins, Matthew Modine and Asia Argento. "I've often been in the right place at the right time," chuckles Pallenberg. "I guess it's a knack."

'Performance' is available now on Warner Home Video; 'Mister Lonely' opens later this year

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