By Alistair Bell
Marianne Faithfull, the wild woman of London’s swinging ’60s who survived drug addiction, homelessness, two comas, cancer and COVID-19, has died at the age of 78 after a singing career that began as a teenager and lasted until her 70s.
“It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull,” her spokesperson said in a statement on Thursday.
Marianne Faithfull in 2009.Credit: Sydney Opera House
“Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed.”
No cause of death was given.
The convent-educated daughter of a World War II British intelligence officer, Faithfull had a front-row seat as drugs, alcohol and sexual excess enveloped the early years of the rock music industry.
Her slow, haunting voice in her first hit, As Tears Go By, in 1964 seemed to portend a darker side to the British pop sound that was winning hearts around the world with the breezy early tunes of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
The former girlfriend of Mick Jagger, Faithfull became addicted to heroin and suffered from anorexia after the relationship ended, spending two years living on the streets of London’s Soho district in the early 1970s.
Marianne Faithfull on the set of The Girl on a Motorcycle.Credit: Getty Images
But no matter how hard she fell, Faithfull always bounced back. She released 21 solo albums, including the critically acclaimed and Grammy-nominated Broken English in 1979, wrote three autobiographies, and had a film acting career.
Her most recent comeback was in 2020 when she caught COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic and went into a coma during a three-week stay at a London hospital. Her son Nicholas later told her the medical staff were so sure she would not recover that they wrote a note on the chart at the bottom of her bed recommending “palliative care only.”
But she got better, and within a year, she finished the album she had been working on before falling sick, She Walks in Beauty, a collection of Romantic-era poems read by her and set to music in collaboration with Warren Ellis of the Dirty Three and the Bad Seeds.
She later complained of symptoms of long COVID, such as tiredness, breathing problems and memory loss, and had to cut short a podcast interview in June 2021.
In March 2022, Faithfull moved into Denville Hall, a retirement home in London that houses actors and other professional performers.
Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull was born on December 29, 1946, in London to a British intelligence officer who interrogated prisoners of war. Her mother was closely related to the Austrian aristocracy.
She attended a Roman Catholic convent boarding school from the age of seven, but even there, she nurtured a rebellious heart.
“Ever since my days at the convent, my secret heroes had been decadents, aesthetes, doomed Romantics, mad Bohemians and opium-eaters,” she wrote in her 1994 book Faithfull: An Autobiography.
Faithfull’s formative years were in the swinging London of the mid-1960s when she was a budding folk singer. At 18, she was married and had a son but attended a party that changed her life.
There, she met Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who launched her popular music career and brought her into the band’s inner circle.
In 1966, she left her husband, artist John Dunbar, and started a relationship with Jagger, the pair becoming the It Couple of London’s psychedelic scene.
Faithfull contributed backing vocals to the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine and gave Jagger a copy of the Russian novel The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which helped inspire the lyrics of the Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil.
She also inspired the key lyrical refrain in Wild Horses when she uttered the phrase “wild horses couldn’t drag me away” and co-wrote Sister Morphine, which she released as a solo single in 1969, two years before the Stones’ version appeared on Sticky Fingers. Although she received a writing credit on her own recording, she didn’t earn parallel status on the Stones’ album until 1994, after a long legal battle.
Marianne Faithfull with Mick Jagger in Sydney in 1969. Credit: Fairfax Media
But much of her fame came from her involvement in drug- and drink-fuelled antics with the bad boys of rock.
She and Jagger were arrested in 1968 for possession of cannabis. Perhaps her most notorious caper was when police came across her, wrapped in a bearskin rug, during a drugs raid at Keith Richards’ country home in 1967.
The incident permanently earned her a place in rock ‘n’ roll legend, but Faithfull later pointed out that she had not, in fact, been taking part in a wild orgy, as British tabloid reports suggested; she had been taking a bath when the police entered the house, and grabbed the nearest thing, a rug, to cover up.
She complained that double standards for women meant she was slandered while the arrests helped boost the image of Jagger and Richards as rock outlaws.
Marianne Faithfull with her Melbourne friend and collaborator, Warren Ellis.Credit: Rosie Matheson
Faithfull also took exception to her portrayal as no more than Jagger’s artistic muse. “It’s a terrible job. You don’t get any male muses, do you? Can you think of one? No,” she said in 2021.
As the 1960s ended, Faithfull’s life of glamour faded quickly, and she spent two years living on the streets of London as an anorexic heroin addict after she and Jagger split in 1970. But among the squalor, she found an upside.
“For me, being a junkie was an admirable life,” she wrote in her autobiography. “It was total anonymity, something I hadn’t known since I was 17. As a street addict in London, I finally found it. I had no telephone, no address.”
The experience was grist for the mill for her album Broken English, which she described as her masterpiece.
Despite the personal cost, including an overdose of sleeping pills in Australia in 1969 that put her in a coma, Faithfull appreciated the chance to learn from great songwriters like Jagger, Paul McCartney and John Lennon.
She had planned to attend Oxford University to study literature, comparative religion and philosophy but instead got another kind of education.
“You know, I didn’t go to Oxford,” she told The Guardian in 2021. “But I watched the best people working and how they worked and, because of Mick, I guess, I watched people writing, too – a brilliant artist at the top of his game.
“I watched how he wrote, and I learned a lot, and I will always be grateful,” she told The Guardian in 2021.
Reuters