Daughter of Italian diplomat and former journalist Count Ernesto Arrighi and Australian prima ballerina and model Eleanora ("Nellie") Douglas Cox, daughter of grazier Douglas Cox, Arrighi was raised in the Vaucluse neighborhood of Sydney, Australia. Her family moved there because her father was the Italian consul. He died when she was young.^[2]

Arrighi began her professional career as a fashion model in Paris, then moved to London, where she studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1967 she played the parts of Corinne in The Champions (‘Reply Box No.66) and a gypsy girl in The Prisoner (‘Many Happy Returns’). After a ten-year career in film and television she retired in the early 1970s to return to art, which she had studied as a young woman. Specializing in copperplate etching and oil painting,^{[3][unreliable source?][4]} she won First Prize for Graphic Art at the 1976 Hong Kong Art Biennial.

In 1977 she married Prince Paolo Borghese, eldest son of the famed Junio Valerio Borghese. They lived in Hong Kong, where he was an engineer, before moving in 1984 to Italy, where she still resides at Palazzo Borghese in Artena.^[2] Her husband died in 1999.^[5] They had a daughter, Flavia.

Her sister is Luciana Arrighi.^[2]