Linda McCartney

American photographer and musician, a chef and cook-book writer. She was also the wife of former Beatle Paul McCartney, an uncommonly stable marriage contracted on 12 March 1969. For 29 years, she and Paul never spent a night apart except for one ten-day period when he was arrested and held in a Tokyo jail for having marijuana on his person. They lived most of their time on a farm in West Sussex, England.

Linda attended Sarah Lawrence and the University of Arizona. (She studied photography and history at Princeton Univ. and then enrolled at the Univ. of Colorado where she met John Melvin See.) While a student, she married, had a daughter and divorced in 1963. Soon after, she took up photography and returned to New York where she began taking pictures of rock groups in 1965, starting with the Dave Clark Five and the Rolling Stones. Meeting many members of the rock culture, her portraits of the '60s rock stars have become classics. Her "Linda McCartney's Sixties: Portrait of an Era," includes several hundred photos.

In 1967, she met Paul in London and they had an intermittent romance for a year. In September 1968, he asked her to move to London to be with him, and from then on, they were inseparable. Along with her daughter Heather, she and Paul had three kids, Mary, Stella and James. Linda performed as a keyboardist and backup singer in two of her husband's post-Beatle bands, Wings and another, touring in 1989 and in 1994.

A staunch campaigner for animal rights, she was also a vegetarian. With her passion for cooking, she published two vegetarian cookbooks, and in 1991 started marketing a line of frozen vegetarian dinners.

Linda's yearning for simplicity was startling considering her silver-spoon background. Her dad, Lee Eastman was a wealthy Park Avenue lawyer and her mom's family owned department stores.