After one long split, Jensen and Ihlen got back together, married and had a baby (Axel Jnr), only for Jensen to meet another woman and leave shortly after the child was born. It was a common preoccupation among the expat community and not always restricted to the men.

The couple had a tempestuous relationship, with the writer determined to reject bourgeois conventions in ways that conveniently coincided with his interest in other women. She was with a young, avant-garde Norwegian novelist called Axel Jensen. Marianne Ihlen had first come to Hydra in early 1958, when the living conditions were primitive and the expat artists could be counted on one hand. Photograph: James Burke/The Life Picture Collection/Getty ImagesĪt the heart of this liberating idyll was a beautiful woman 13 years his senior, the mother of an eight-year-old boy. Leonard Cohen (holding the guitar) with Marianne (looking at him) and friends in Hydra, Greece, October 1960. And her effect on the film-maker was almost as influential as her part in the Canadian poet-musician’s career. They too were lovers for a while during one of the long breaks in Ihlen’s relationship with Cohen.

Broomfield is not a disinterested observer. The relationship’s legacy was a catalogue of classic songs – So Long Marianne, Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye, Bird on the Wire – a great deal of heartache, but also a lasting sense of the creative power of love.Īll of this the documentary maker Nick Broomfield explores in his tender, funny and hauntingly moving new film Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love. Theirs had been a large and chaotic romance that was in many respects a product of the particular times (the 1960s) and the specific place (the Greek island of Hydra) in which they met. I n November 2016, the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, renowned for his plaintive ballads, died a few months after the woman who inspired many of them, his Norwegian lover and muse, Marianne Ihlen.

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