During the 1950s and 1960s, she was the muse and inspiration for many artists of the Soho subculture, including Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and (much later) Maggi Hambling, and she was known for her three marriages and numerous love affairs.

She was born Audrey Wendy Abbott in Simla, British India, where her father was stationed in the Indian Air Force.

[3][4] Lucian Freud, with whom she had an affair, painted Moraes at least three times, including a celebrated 1953 portrait entitled Girl in a Blanket.

After her death, Tim Hilton speculated that this was the result of sitting through the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 together with her journalist husband Dom Moraes, who had been sent there by The Times of India.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s Moraes was caretaker of Roundwood House, near Mountrath, County Laois, Ireland, which was being restored by the Irish Georgian Society.

Guinness heiress Caroline Blackwood discreetly paid school fees for Moraes's two children during her most untethered years, but Henrietta was not told about it.

She started to write about her life in the book Henrietta, published by Hamish Hamilton in 1994, and was working on a follow-up at the time of her death.

Moraes died in London in 1999 at the age of 67 in her bed while on the phone to her doctor, bequeathing her long-haired dachshund dog Max to Hambling.