Suze Rotolo (1943 – 2011), American artist and activist, known as Bob Dylan's girlfriend and muse in Greenwich Village, New York from 1961 to 1964, made an appearance in Martin Scorsese's documentary film "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan", which focused on Dylan's early career from 1961 to 1966. Watch here some mixed clips from the film:
Bob and Suze (in separate interviews for the film) speaking on Woody Guthrie and the folk scene in the Sixties in the Village, on topics such as the civil rights movement and the threat of nuclear war, living together, among other figures in the folk music and bohemian scene in Greenwich Village.
Rotolo first met Dylan at a Riverside Church folk concert in July 1961.Describing their meeting in his memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, Dylan wrote: "Right from the start I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves. We started talking and my head started to spin. Cupid’s arrow had whistled past my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard... Meeting her was like stepping into the tales of 1001 Arabian Nights. She had a smile that could light up a street full of people and was extremely lively, had a kind of voluptuousness—a Rodin sculpture come to life." They started living together in early 1962.
At about the time she met Dylan, Rotolo began working full-time as a political activist in the office of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the anti-nuclear group SANE.
Dylan later acknowledged her strong influence on his music and art during that period.