Those who first glimpsed Marianne Faithfull in the 1960s as Mick Jagger’s angelic girlfriend, or the winsome singer of As Tears Go By, probably did not imagine she would go on to forge a career of more than 50 years as a songwriter and recording artist in her own right. Faithfull, who has died aged 78, released 22 solo albums and collaborated with many big names in music. She also had some success as an actor. All of it was achieved against a backdrop of addiction and personal struggles that she did not hide.
When the 17-year-old Faithfull was spotted by the Rolling Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, at a Stones launch party in 1964, she had already been taking tentative steps as a folk singer. Oldham’s antennae sensed the potential.
Her upbringing had equipped her for the bubbling social laboratory of the mid-60s. Marianne’s mother, Eva Erisso, was a Viennese baroness descended from the Habsburg dynasty, and had performed as a ballet dancer with the Max Reinhardt Company in her youth. Her father, Glynn Faithfull, a major in British army intelligence, met Eva in Vienna and brought her back to postwar Britain. Born in Hampstead, north London, Marianne spent her early years at a commune with which her father had become involved at Braziers Park in south Oxfordshire. After her parents divorced, she attended St Joseph’s convent school in Reading, Berkshire.
Oldham paired Faithfull up with the Jagger-Richards composition As Tears Go By, which the Stones themselves had not yet recorded. Her pop career lifted off immediately. She cut a string of successful singles, including Come and Stay With Me, This Little Bird and Summer Nights. She reached the UK Top 10 four times in 1964-65 and scored a Top 40 success with a cover of the Beatles’ Yesterday.
Faithfull in 1965. Photograph: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy
However, her progress was impeded by her marriage to the gallerist and cultural scene-maker John Dunbar in 1965. The couple had a son, Nicholas, when Faithfull was 18, but the union was short-lived. Faithfull took her baby and sought refuge with the Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones and his girlfriend, the model Anita Pallenberg, in London. She was drawn into the Stones’ inner circle, and soon began her affair with Jagger. The 1967 drugs raid on Keith Richards’ West Sussex home, Redlands, brought her tabloid infamy as “girl in a fur skin rug”.
Faithfull’s creative ambitions extended into acting, where she achieved notable successes. On stage, she appeared in Chekhov’s Three Sisters and played Ophelia to Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet. On celluloid, she provoked shivers of excitement as the leather-clad heroine of The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968), and was cast as the demonic Lilith in Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising. In later life, she played the Empress Maria Theresa in Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette (2006) and appeared in the sitcom Absolutely Fabulous in 2001 playing God, with Pallenberg as the Devil.
Her relationship with Jagger disintegrated in 1970, the year she suffered a miscarriage. When she also lost custody of Nicholas, she attempted suicide and fell into heroin addiction. In 1969 she had written the song Sister Morphine, later recorded by the Stones for the album Sticky Fingers, apparently before she had ever tried the drug. Now she spent two years as an addict, living on the streets of Soho.
With help from various friends, and enrolled in an NHS treatment programme, she persevered with efforts to restart her singing career, and after moving to Ireland she hit the top of the Irish charts with her 1976 single Dreamin’ My Dreams.
Faithfull with Nicol Williamson in Hamlet, 1969. Photograph: Snap/Rex
In 1979 she married the musician Ben Brierly, the same year in which she recorded her highly praised comeback album, Broken English. The disc introduced a startlingly transformed Faithfull, singing songs of rage and disgust. Why D’Ya Do It, an obscene tirade of sexual jealousy (with words by Heathcote Williams), still stands as one of rock music’s most shockingly taboo-busting moments. As a statement of bloody-minded survival from a woman written off by many as beautiful but doomed, it was hard to beat.
The turn of the 80s brought another album, Dangerous Acquaintances, and a move to New York. She struck up a rapport with the producer Hal Willner, who recruited her to sing Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife for his Kurt Weill tribute album, Lost in the Stars (1985). Two years later Willner produced Faithfull’s album Strange Weather, on which she displayed her still-expanding artistry via covers of songs by Jerome Kern, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan, as well as a new version of As Tears Go By.
But her emotional life continued to be wreckage-strewn, as she underwent more rehab treatment for her continuing addiction and conducted an affair with a fellow-addict, Howard Tose, who died after jumping out of a window when it ended. She divorced Brierly in 1986 and married the actor Giorgio della Terza in 1988. They divorced in 1991.
Faithfull and Mick Jagger arriving at court to face drugs charges, 1970. Photograph: Roy Cummings/THA/Shutterstock
In 1994 she delivered Faithfull: An Autobiography, which bristled with gripping yarns about her past, her famous friends and her addictions. “I really have been as honest as I possibly could,” she said. “Truth is terribly relative, of course.” In 1995 she collaborated with the composer Angelo Badalamenti on A Secret Life, but then found herself developing an increasing interest in Weill and Germany’s Weimar Republic era. On the live album 20th Century Blues (1996) she performed Weill (as well as Harry Nilsson and Noël Coward) with just piano and string bass, then cemented her claim to be a new Lotte Lenya by performing Brecht and Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins at the Salzburg festival. A recording of the piece followed.
Daniel Lanois was in the producer’s chair for her next project, Vagabond Ways (1999), on which she contrasted her own material with pieces by Leonard Cohen, Elton John and Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters. Waters had recruited her for his 1990 performance of The Wall in Berlin. She described the material as “dark, dark, dark”, and commented that “I sing my shadow. I’m singing the dark side of myself.” Abuzz with creative energy, she cut Kissin’ Time in 2002 with several fashionable collaborators, including Beck and Jarvis Cocker, then teamed up with PJ Harvey and Nick Cave for Before the Poison (2005).
Faithfull in The Girl on a Motorcycle, 1968. Photograph: Ares Production/Allstar
In 2006 a diagnosis of breast cancer forced her to cancel a concert tour. Then, living in Paris with her manager and boyfriend, François Ravard, she underwent treatment and was back onstage in early 2007 with her touring show Songs of Innocence and Experience. In October that year she announced that she had been suffering from the liver-threatening disease hepatitis C for more than a decade. The following month, she released a second volume of autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, and was nominated for the best actress award by the European Film Academy for her portrayal of Maggie, a 60-year-old widow working in the sex industry in Sam Garbarski’s film Irina Palm.
A diverse album of cover versions recorded with Willner, Easy Come, Easy Go, appeared in Europe in 2008, and in the UK and the US the following year. Faithfull had taken much of that year off to recuperate from “mental, physical and nervous exhaustion”, but in 2009 she began a string of concert dates across Europe and the US.
Faithful performing at the Dominion theatre, London, 1982 Photograph: David Corio/Redferns
Horses and High Heels (2011) contrasted 60s classics with a batch of new songs. In 2012, Faithfull performed in a fully staged production of The Seven Deadly Sins in Linz. During the show’s run she explored further her roots in Mitteleuropa when she was the subject of the BBC TV show Who Do You Think You Are?, investigating her mother’s history in 1920s Berlin and wartime Vienna.
A performance in 2013 at the Meltdown festival in London, curated by Yoko Ono, was followed by a burst of songwriting activity in which Faithfull collaborated with Waters, Steve Earle, Tom McRae and others, resulting in her 20th solo album, Give My Love to London (2014).
Marianne Faithfull: A Life on Record, telling her life story through a selection of pictures by renowned photographers, was published in 2014. A live album, No Exit (2016), was recorded on a tour marking her 50th anniversary as a recording artist, which continued despite disruptions to the schedule caused by Faithfull suffering complications from a broken hip. On Negative Capability (2018), she co-wrote eight of the songs, as well as re-recording old favourites.
In April 2020 Faithfull spent three weeks in hospital suffering from Covid-19. She was seriously ill and the virus did lasting damage to her lungs. She admitted it was possible she would never sing again, but told the Guardian: “I do believe in miracles.” She was able to finish a new album, She Walks in Beauty, on which she recited the poetry of Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth, and which was released in 2021.
She is survived by her son.
