Marianne Greenwood was born as Ebba Marianne Hederström in 1916 in Gällivare, Sweden. She grew up in a hospitable home with cultural and scientific interests, alongside three brothers and two sisters.

Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Marianne moved to Stockholm to study at the School of Arts and Crafts (now Konstfack). After attending a hotel school in Lausanne, the vibrant Marianne eventually made her way to France. She sold her wedding ring to buy her first Hasselblad camera. With the camera in hand but without a penny to her name, she arrived in war-torn Paris at the beginning of the 1950s. The tall blonde with bare feet and cut-up men's shirts quickly became a popular model among the young artists of the time.

She became a close friend of Pablo Picasso and his family. For seven years, she lived and worked at the first Musée Picasso in the Grimaldi Castle, Antibes, as a guide and house photographer. She undertook extensive work documenting and publishing the art collections, including for the book "Picasso à Musée d'Antibes," published in 1954. The only drawing Picasso made of her was given away, but she often modelled for Françoise Gilot, Picasso's then partner. Gilot's drawings are preserved in the book "Pages d'Amour", with poems by André Verdet, published in 1951 and dedicated to Marianne Greenwood.

Antibes attracted writers and artists from all corners of the earth, and Marianne Greenwood became acquainted with cultural figures such as Fritz Lang, Henry Miller, Andy Warhol, and Anaïs Nin. The latter would describe her as "the eternal vagabond," with "a rare gift for friendship." In 2006, just over a week after a major exhibition featuring a selection of her photographs opened at the Swedish Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, Marianne Greenwood passed away in her home in Antibes. She was honoured with a memorial exhibition at the Musée Picasso.

(freely adapted from the Swedish Women's Biographical Lexicon skbl.se)