Inger Elliott

New York - Inger Elliott, Photojournalist, Textile Designer and Author, Dies at 90.

Inger McCabe Elliott, whose career as a photojournalist included stints in Saigon during the Vietnam War and memorable portraits of Hollywood stars such as Ingrid Bergman and Marlon Brando, and who founded the acclaimed New York textile design firm China Seas and who, later, became a key figure in the events that inspired "Six Degrees of Separation," died Jan. 29, 2024, in New York. She was 90.

Elliott, who owned homes in Stonington starting in the late 1960s, graduated from Cornell University and learned her trade under legendary photographer Ken Heyman. Early in her career, she was based in Hong Kong, where her husband was a Newsweek journalist assigned to Vietnam. She traveled the world as a photographer for Rapho Guillumette Pictures, publishing photographs in magazines such as Life and Vogue.

Five years later, by then divorced and with three children to support, she founded textile and interior design firm, China Seas. That decision was inspired in part by a suggestion from Oscar de la Renta's wife, Francoise, Elliott told the New York Times in 2015.

In her 1984 book, "Batik: Fabled Cloth of Java," Elliott explained how her outlook was transformed by batik after seeing the world for so many years in the black-and-white photos that were the standard of her era. "One day in 1963, in a modest shop in Hong Kong, my black-and-white world turned into glorious color," she wrote. "That was the moment when the splendors of Java's north-coast batik burst upon me."

She donated her textiles, more than 700 pieces of batik, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It was exhibited there in the 1990s. She was also the author of "Henry's World," "Amy's World" and "Exteriors." She developed and ran "Conversations at Sotheby's" and was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a trustee at the American Scandinavian Foundation, a trustee emeritus for the Asia Society and a member of Stonington's Wadawanuck Club.

Elliott was born Inger Abrahamsen in 1933, the first of two children, to David Abrahamsen, a psychiatrist and author and scion of a prominent Jewish family, and his wife, Lova. Her father served as a physician in the Norwegian Army and then, targeted by the Nazi regime that occupied Norway, fled to the U.K. and then the U.S.

She arrived in America with her mother and sister in 1941 after an epic trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, Yokohama, San Francisco, Illinois and New York, where the family ultimately settled.

She graduated from Cornell in 1954, and several years later met Robert K. McCabe, an aspiring foreign correspondent and graduate of Dartmouth College, on a ski trip to Stowe, Vt. They married in 1960, and had three children, Kari, Alec and Marit McCabe, all of whom survive her. She is also survived by her three stepchildren, Diana Lidofsky, Cynthia Elliott and Dorinda Elliott.

The couple studied at Harvard and Yale before moving to Asia as freelancers and settling in Hong Kong, where her first two children were born. It was in Hong Kong, then a British colony, that they adopted two Chinese refugee children, Bing and Pui Wong. Pui Wong died in 2020.

In 1973, she married Newsweek Editor-in-Chief Osborn Elliott, whom she had met a decade earlier as he toured Asia in company of his then-wife, Deirdre, and Washington Post Co. President Katharine Graham.

Elliott and the blended family settled into an apartment overlooking the East River in Manhattan, spending summers at the former First Baptist Church in Stonington, the first of three homes she owned in the Borough. It was in that New York apartment that a purported college classmate of her daughter arrived and set in motion the events that inspired John Guare to write his 1990 play, "Six Degrees of Separation," which became a 1993 film starring a young Will Smith.

The family plans to hold a celebration of Elliott's life in early March in Manhattan.