Inge Schönthal was born on 24 November 1930, before her father, who was of Jewish descent, moved to the Netherlands in 1938.

In 1952, during a long stay in New York City, she was able to photograph Greta Garbo, Elia Kazan, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Winston Churchill.

Among her most celebrated photos are those of writers Ernest Hemingway, Edoardo Sanguineti, Allen Ginsberg, Günter Grass, Nadine Gordimer and artists Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall.

[2] She met Italian left-wing publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in 1958, whom she later married in Mexico and followed to Milan (he had two previous marriages).

[3] When her husband died three years later, during an attempted terrorist attack on the Milan electricity network,[5] she became president of the company, which she led together with her son Carlo.