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Berry Berenson

Berry Berenson’s screen career belongs to a wider life spent making and shaping images. Born Berinthia Berenson in Murray Hill, Manhattan, on April 14, 1948, she was known from an early age as Berry. Acting was only one part of her creative work: she was also a model and an accomplished freelance photographer whose pictures appeared in Life, Glamour, Vogue and Newsweek by 1973. After a brief modeling career in the late 1960s, Berenson moved behind the camera. Her eye also became part of the visual identity of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. When her fiancé Richard Bernstein was hired as its cover artist in 1972, Berenson recruited and photographed models, with Bernstein illustrating the resulting images. That movement between being photographed, taking photographs and eventually acting gives her career a particularly interesting shape. Berenson studied acting with Wynn Handman at New York’s American Place Theatre. Her fellow students included Richard Gere, Philip Anglim, Penelope Milford, Robert Ozn, Ingrid Boulting and her elder sister, model and actress Marisa Berenson. In Alan Rudolph’s 1978 film Remember My Name, Berry starred opposite her husband, Anthony Perkins. She subsequently appeared with Jeff Bridges in Winter Kills in 1979 and with Malcolm McDowell in Cat People in 1982. There is an appealing symmetry to Berenson’s work in front of the camera. She arrived there with the composure of someone who already understood what a lens could capture, having experienced image-making from several directions. Her acting credits sit alongside a substantial photographic career rather than eclipsing it. Berenson, who lived from 1948 to 2001, also came from a family closely connected to fashion and the arts. Her mother was the socialite Gogo Schiaparelli, her sister was Marisa Berenson, and her maternal grandmother was the Italian-born fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Yet Berry Berenson established her own place in that creative lineage—as a model, photographer and film actor with a distinctive career on both sides of the camera.