She married actor and film director Christian Marquand in 1963, at the age of 17.Christian Marquand was a fearless young actor whose coterie included Roman Polanski, Roger Vadim, Donald Cammell, Marlon Brando (both Brando and Vadim named their sons Christian after him) and the Rolling Stones. Marquand had introduced Cammell to Brando after the latter had scalded his testicles following an incident with a hot cup of coffee and was languishing in hospital, and their friendship once sealed led to Brando being initially offered a role in Cammell’s Performance, as well as to a lifelong tempestuous friendship between them.
An olympian libertine, Marquand had met Tina through Roger Vadim and, encouraged by her father who was concerned for his daughter’s new lifestyle, married her in 1963 when she was only 17, at a family residence in Provence. Tina was on the cover of Paris-Match. Their wedding guest list read like a who’s who of ‘the scene’. The more well-known faces like Brando had to shuffle around in heavy disguise to avoid the French tabloid menagerie that had crawled in. Mick and Keith were kept in a neighbouring village.
Meanwhile Jean-Pierre Aumont had already taken care of acting lessons for Tina in New York with Stella Adler. Fresh from her training Tina scored a role in Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise in 1966, which led her and Christian to London where they took a flat which soon acquired the same party central status as their place in Paris. Marquand had acquired the rights for his friend, the American writer Terry Southern’s novel Candy, and had started working on the film adaptation he was to direct. While in London, Marquand threw a swanky party for Bob Dylan when he arrived in town. Tina was hanging out with Anita Pallenberg, Brian Jones, Deborah Dixon, Robert Fraser and Marianne Faithfull. Nights were spent at the Ad Lib club and days out included visits to crumbling palaces, and drinking wine with her gang in England’s ancient hostelries. Her favourite concert experience was seeing The Who throw their destructive stage power around.
For Tina, Brian Jones’s death marked the close of the London sixties. She’d been very fond of him and like many others in their circle felt that something important about the period had died with Brian. During one of the more intense patches in Jones and Pallenberg’s feisty relationship, Jones turned up at Tina and Christian’s flat convinced that Anita was taking refuge in one of the closets, and woudn’t leave till he had searched the entire place for her.
With Modesty Blaise in the can, Tina went on to film Texas Across The River (1966) with Dean Martin and Alain Delon, but her private life was not so rosy. It was around this time that her marriage to Christian began to show cracks. She had a miscarriage which he seemed to blame her for, and within weeks their three year marriage was over.