Marianne Faithfull, singer and British pop icon, dies at 78 National |
'Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed,' a company spokesperson said in a statement.
Marianne Faithfull, the British pop star, muse, libertine and old soul who inspired and helped write some of the Rolling Stonesâ greatest songs and endured as a torch singer and survivor of the lifestyle she once embodied, has died. She was 78.
Faithfull passed away Thursday in London, her music promotion company Republic Media said.
âIt is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull,â a company spokesperson said in a statement. âMarianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed.â
The blonde, voluptuous Faithfull was a celebrity before turning 17, homeless by her mid-20s and an inspiration to peers and younger artists by her early 30s, when her raw, explicit Broken English album brought her the kinds of reviews the Stones had received. Over the following decades, her admirers would include Beck, Billy Corgan, Nick Cave and PJ Harvey, although her history would always be closely tied to the Stones and to the years she dated Mick Jagger.
One of the first songs written by Jagger and Keith Richards, the melancholy As Tears Go By, was her breakthrough hit when released in 1964 and the start of her close and tormented relationship with the band.
She and Jagger began seeing each other in 1966 and became one of the most glamorous and notorious couples of âSwinging London,â with Faithfull once declaring that if LSD âwasnât meant to happen, it wouldnât have been invented.â Their rejection of conventional values was defined by a widely publicized 1967 drug bust that left Jagger and Richards briefly in jail and Faithfull identified in tabloids as âNaked Girl At Stones Party,â a label she would find humiliating and inescapable.
âOne of the hazards of reforming your evil ways is that some people wonât let go of their mindâs eye of you as a wild thing,â she wrote in Memories, Dreams and Reflections, a 2007 memoir.
Jagger and Richards often cited bluesmen and early rock ân rollers as their prime influences, but Faithfull and her close friend Anita Pallenberg, Richardsâ longtime partner, also opened the band to new ways of thinking. Both were worldlier than their boyfriends at the time, and helped transform the Stonesâ songwriting and personas, whether as muses or as collaborators.
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Faithfull helped inspire such Stones songs as the mellow tribute She Smiled Sweetly and the lustful Letâs Spend the Night Together. It was Faithful who lent Jagger the Russian novel The Master and Margarita that was the basis for Sympathy for the Devil and who first recorded and contributed lyrics to the Stonesâ dire Sister Morphine, notably the opening line, âHere I lie in my hospital bed.â Faithfullâs drug use helped shape such jaded takes on the London rock scene as You Canât Always Get What You Want and Live with Me, while her time with Jagger also coincided with one of his most vulnerable love songs, Wild Horses.
On her own, the London-born Faithfull specialized at first in genteel ballads, among them Come Stay With Me, Summer Nights and This Little Bird. But even in her teens, Faithfull sang in a fragile alto that suggested knowledge and burdens far beyond her years. Her voice would later crack and coarsen, and her life and work after splitting with Jagger in 1970 was one of looking back and carrying on through emotional and physical pain.
She had become addicted to heroin in the late â60s, suffered a miscarriage while seven months pregnant and nearly died from an overdose of sleeping pills. (Jagger, meanwhile, had an affair with Pallenberg and had a baby with actor Marsha Hunt). By the early â70s, Faithfull was living in the streets of London and had lost custody of the son, Nicholas, she had with her estranged husband, the gallery owner John Dunbar. She would also battle anorexia and hepatitis, was treated for breast cancer, broke her hip in a fall and was hospitalized with COVID-19 in 2020.
She shared everything, uncensored, in her memoirs and in her music, notably Broken English, which came out in 1979 and featured her seething Whyâd Ya Do It and conflicted Guilt, in which she chants âI feel guilt, I feel guilt, though I know Iâve done no wrong.â Other albums included Dangerous Acquaintances, Strange Weather, the live Blazing Away and, most recently, She Walks in Beauty. Though Faithfull was defined by the 1960s, her sensibility often reached back to the pre-rock world of German cabaret, and she covered numerous songs by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, including Ballad of the Soldierâs Wife and the âsungâ ballet The Seven Deadly Sins.
Her interests extended to theatre, film and television. Faithfull began acting in the 1960s, including an appearance in Jean-Luc Godardâs Made In U.S.A. and stage roles in Hamlet and Chekhovâs Three Sisters. She would later appear in such films as Marie Antoinette and The Girl from Nagasaki, and the TV series Absolutely Fabulous, in which she was cast as â and did not flinch from playing â God.
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Faithful was married three times, and in recent years dated her manager, Francois Ravard. Jagger was her most famous lover, but other men in her life included Richards (âso great and memorable,â she would say of their one-night stand), David Bowie and the early rock star Gene Pitney. Among the rejected: Bob Dylan, who had been so taken that he was writing a song about her, until Faithfull, pregnant with her son at the time, turned him down.
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âWithout warning, he turned into Rumpelstiltskin,â she wrote in Faithfull, published in 1994. âHe went over to the typewriter, took a sheaf of papers and began ripping them up into smaller and smaller pieces, after which he let them fall into the wastepaper basket.â
Faithfullâs heritage was one of intrigue, decadence and fallen empires. Her father was a British intelligence officer during World War II who helped saved her mother from the Nazis in Vienna. Faithfullâs more distant ancestors included various Austro-Hungarian aristocrats and Count Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a 19th century Austrian whose last name and scandalous novel Venus in Furs helped create the term âmasochism.â
Faithfullâs parents separated when she was 6 and her childhood would include time in a convent and in what she would call a ânuttyâ sex-obsessed commune. By her teens, she was reading Simone de Beauvoir, listening to Odetta and Joan Baez and singing in folk clubs. Through the London art scene, she met Dunbar, who introduced her to Paul McCartney and other celebrities. Dunbar also co-founded the Indica Gallery, where John Lennon would say he met Yoko Ono.
âThe threads of a dozen little scenes were invisibly twining together,â she wrote in her memoir. âAll these people â gallery owners, photographers, pop stars, aristocrats and assorted talented layabouts more or less invented the scene in London, so I guess I was present at the creation.â
Her future was set in March 1964, when she attended a recording party for one of Londonâs hot young bands, the Rolling Stones. Scorning the idea that she and Jagger immediately fell for each other, she would regard the Stones as âyobby schoolboysâ and witnessed Jagger fighting with his then-girlfriend, the model Chrissie Shrimpton, so in tears that her false eyelashes were peeling off.
But she was deeply impressed by one man, Stones manager Andrew âLoogâ Oldham, who looked âpowerful and dangerous and very sure of himself.â A week later, Oldham sent her a telegram, asking her to come to Londonâs Olympic Studios. With Jagger and Richards looking on, Oldham played her a demo of a âvery primitiveâ song, A Tears Go By, which Faithfull needed just two takes to complete.
âItâs an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of 20 to have written,â Faithfull wrote in her 1994 memoir. âA song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life. The uncanny thing is that Mick should have written those words so long before everything happened. Itâs almost as is if our whole relationship was prefigured in that song.â
Brian Melley contributed from London.
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