Edith Minturn Sedgwick Post (April 20, 1943 – November 16, 1971) was an American actress, model, and socialite. Best known as a Warhol superstar, Vogue named her a "Youthquaker" in 1965, recognizing her influence on youth culture and style.
Born in California into a prominent New England family, Sedgwick briefly studied sculpture in Cambridge before moving to New York City in 1964. The following year, she became a muse to Pop artist Andy Warhol and starred in several of his underground films, including Poor Little Rich Girl (1965) and Beauty No. 2 (1965). Her distinctive look and screen presence made her one of the defining style icons of the mid-1960s. After leaving Warhol's Factory scene in 1966, she pursued acting and modeling independently but never regained the same level of prominence. Her mental health deteriorated from drug abuse, and she struggled to complete the semi-autobiographical film Ciao! Manhattan (1972). Sedgwick died of an overdose in 1971 at the age of 28.
Early life and education (1943–1963)
Family background and early childhood
Edith "Edie" Minturn Sedgwick was born at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, California on April 20, 1943. She was the seventh of eight children of Alice Delano de Forest (1908–1988) and Francis Minturn Sedgwick (1904–1967). Her father was a rancher, sculptor, and member of the historical Sedgwick family of Massachusetts. Her maternal grandfather Henry Wheeler de Forest was the president and chairman of the board of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Her maternal great-grandfather, Reverend Endicott Peabody, founded the Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts. She was named after her father's aunt, Edith Minturn Stokes. She was of English and French Huguenot ancestry.
Despite the family's wealth and social prominence, Sedgwick's childhood was marked by isolation and strict parental control. Raised primarily on her father's California ranches, she and her siblings were homeschooled, cared for by nannies, and sheltered from the outside world. Her sister Alice "Saucie" Sedgwick later recalled, "We really lived in two worlds—indoors and outdoors. Outdoors, that vast physical world of the ranch, was just pure freedom and elation, especially if you were out riding alone. Indoors meant inside the main house with the family. That was the world of form—very strict rules of conduct, all repressive, all belonging to that other world in the East that my parents were from." The family's fortunes increased in the early 1950s after oil was discovered on Rancho Corral de Quati, generating substantial income and enabling the purchase of the larger nearby Rancho La Laguna in 1952.
Several of Sedgwick's siblings had conflicted relationships with their father, whom they called "Fuzzy" because he "didn't want to be called Daddy." As an adult, Sedgwick told friends that he had attempted to molest her several times, beginning when she was aged 7. It was within these familial conditions that Sedgwick, by her early teens, developed an eating disorder, settling into a pattern of binging and purging.
Boarding schools and mental health treatment
At age 13, following the death of her grandfather Henry Dwight Sedgwick, she attended The Branson School near San Francisco. According to her sister Alice, she was soon withdrawn from the school because of anorexia and she returned to an abusive home life. Sedgwick told her friend Gillian Walker that "her father would come after her and lock her up and force her to stay in bed—a helpless, isolated prisoner, a drugged princess." Her brother, Jonathan Sedgwick, recalled that after she discovered their father having sex with a mistress, he slapped her and dismissed her account as delusional, then had her sedated by a doctor. "Mummy wouldn't believe her—she just had a blockage against things like that. Nobody'd believe her, so she was really a prisoner," he said.
In 1958, Sedgwick's parents enrolled her at St. Timothy's School in Maryland. She was eventually taken out of the school due to her continuing eating disorder. In the autumn of 1962, at her father's insistence, Sedgwick was committed to the private Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut. Since the regime was very lax, she easily manipulated her situation and her weight kept dropping. She was later sent to Bloomingdale, the Westchester Division of New York Hospital, where her anorexia improved. After her release from Bloomingdale, she had an affair with a Harvard student and underwent an abortion.
Cambridge period and move to New York (1963–1965)
Sedgwick moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she had family, and made her debut as a debutante in June 1963. In the autumn, she began taking private sculpting lessons from her cousin, artist Lily Saarinen. During this period, she partied with members of an elite bohemian fringe of the Cambridge social scene and was drawn to the local gay community. Sedgwick became a regular at the Casablanca bar, where she met Harvard graduate Chuck Wein, who became her companion.
On her twenty-first birthday in April 1964, Sedgwick received an $80,000 ($861,811 in 2026) trust fund from her maternal grandmother. Soon after, Sedgwick and Wein left Cambridge for New York City, where she intended to pursue modeling. That summer, she moved in with her grandmother, who lived at East 71st Street and Park Avenue. She quickly immersed herself in the city's social scene and developed a reputation for extravagant spending on clothes and the Bermuda Limousine Service.
Her friend Tom Goodwin recalled that she embraced New York's nightlife, frequenting the discotheque Ondine and expensive restaurants such as L'Avventura, often treating friends to lavish meals and hiring Goodwin as her chauffeur for $100 a week. Danny Fields similarly remembered her treating large groups of acquaintances to dinner while ignoring mounting bills. According to Goodwin, Sedgwick exhausted her trust fund in about six months and reacted with disbelief when informed that the money was gone, insisting that, given her family's wealth, she should have unlimited access to funds.
In late 1964, she moved into an apartment at 16 East 63rd Street in Manhattan's Lenox Hill neighborhood on the Upper East Side. In December 1964, Sedgwick was injured in an automobile accident while visiting California when she ran a flashing red light. Her friend G. J. Barker-Benfield was sitting in the passenger seat; his head went through the windshield, but he survived.
During this period, Sedgwick was deeply affected by the loss of her older brothers, Francis Jr. (known as "Minty") and Robert (known as "Bobby"), who died within eighteen months of each other. Francis, who had a particularly unhappy relationship with their father, suffered several mental breakdowns, eventually dying by suicide in 1964 while at Silver Hill Hospital. Robert also suffered from mental health problems and died after falling into a coma when his motorcycle crashed into the side of a New York City bus on New Year's Eve 1965.
Andy Warhol and the Factory (1965–1966)
Rise at the Factory and early films