Ultra Violet

Underground celebrity Ultra Violet was born Isabelle Collin Dufresne in 1935 in France, a convent-raised French bourgeois heiress. A coiffured society deb in those days, she moved to New York in 1953 where she spent a decade surrounding herself with artists like John Graham, John Chamberlain, and Salvador Dalí, the last with whom triggered her career as a painter. An exotic vamp in style and attitude, Ultra Violet seemed to pick up quite a bit of makeup tips from silent star Theda Bara and went on to appear in Warhol's The Life of Juanita Castro (1965) and I, a Man (1967) before her cameo inclusions in other now-cult films. Her best-selling 1988 autobiography "Famous for Fifteen Minutes: My Years with Andy Warhol" detailed her rise in celebrity, and her play "You Are What You Eat" was performed in Czechoslovakia in 1992. As a visual artist with political and spiritual overtones, her mixed-media works have been displayed worldwide.