Singer, muse, addict: Marianne Faithfull was a poster child of the 60s
Marianne Faithfull was convinced that when the 1960s ended, her life was effectively over. Her relationship with Mick Jagger had collapsed and she sank into a life of drug addiction, ending up on the streets – until a career revival.
As a poster child for the freewheeling spirit of the 1960s, Marianne Faithfull was convinced that when the decade ended, her life was effectively over with it.
It wasn’t, of course, and she was only 23, but her fear was understandable. The termination of the 1960s also coincided with the collapse of her relationship with Mick Jagger and she sank into a life of drug addiction and ended up living on the streets.
Although Faithfull and Jagger were together for only four years, her name would forever be associated with the Rolling Stones singer and the high tide of the 1960s when they were swinging London’s most feted celebrity couple.
“Even now people want to keep me frozen in that decade. People can’t or won’t see that you can change and grow up,” she was still complaining 40 years later.
Joan Baez made similar protestations about her life being defined by her 18-month affair in the 1960s with Bob Dylan and when Faithfull was admitted to a care home in 2022, newspaper headlines were still framing her as “Mick Jagger’s ex-lover”.
In the end, like the Stones themselves, Faithfull proved to be one of life’s great survivors.
She came through not only heroin addiction and homelessness but suicide attempts, broken marriages, breast cancer and Covid-19. As she did so she created some compellingly powerful and autobiographical music that ranged from the fractious, X-rated songs on her platinum-selling 1979 album Broken English to deep dives into the work of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht.
As the years took their toll and she refused to be bowed, she became a feminist role model to a younger generation of independent and assertive women, who saw Faithfull as a proudly defiant trailblazer who had been to the wildest shores and returned to pass on her experience.
She was befriended by Courtney Love, Sinead O’Connor and Kate Moss among others, all troubled young women in the public eye who took their problems to Faithfull in the knowledge that whatever traumas they were suffering, Faithfull had been there years before.
Being one of the world’s most beautiful and desirable women in her youth was “a trip you never forget”, she observed in middle age, by which time drugs and the arrows of time had compromised her looks.
Yet if the mirror’s reflection disappointed her, she didn’t let it show and she took pride in the role of an older woman who refused to grow old invisibly.
In her fifties she posed in her underwear for the photographer David Bailey, who had shot many of the best known and era-defining images of Faithfull in her 1960s prime.
The pictures, which were published in The Times in 1999, did not flatter her but she had no regrets and regarded them as an important statement on behalf of mature women.
Along with her looks, she also lost the angelic convent girl’s voice heard on her first hit record, the Jagger-Richards composed As Tears Go By, which took her into the charts when she was 17.
Doggedly, she turned the loss to advantage and used the cracked and lived-in patina her voice had acquired to theatrical effect.
If she was sometimes irritated by those who tried to lock her in the past, she also revelled in her part in history.
In old age, her interviews were still proudly full of stories about her times with “Mick”, “Keith” (Richards), “Brian” (Jones), “Jimi” (Hendrix), “Bob” (Dylan) and “Andy” (Warhol).
She never bothered with anything other than first names for everybody knew to whom she was referring.
“If I wasn’t there, it didn’t happen,” she said in a neat twist on the “if you can remember the Sixties” canard.
She was Jagger’s muse in several classic Stones’ songs from the carnality of Let’s Spend the Night Together to the unabashed romanticism of Wild Horses and You Can’t Always Get What You Want.
She also co-wrote the lyrics to the bleak and harrowing Sister Morphine, which appeared on the Stones’ 1971 album Sticky Fingers.
Her contribution later became the subject of a protracted legal battle over royalties and it was not until 1994 that her joint authorship with Jagger and Richards was recognised.
Before the 1960s had finished she had slept with no fewer than three of the Stones, including Richards who bedded her as a way of getting revenge on Jagger, who had enjoyed a fling with his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, while they were starring together in the film Performance.
“It was ludicrous, but that’s how we were then,” Faithfull said.
She also slept with Jones. She didn’t fancy him but didn’t know how to say no.
“I was in his flat. I was a pretty girl. He was a Rolling Stone, making it almost de rigueur that he make a pass at me,” she explained. “I thought, ‘I really should let him’.”
She became the stuff of urban legend in 1967 when the police raided Richards’ country house, Redlands, in Sussex. There was a drug-fuelled party going on and Faithfull was arrested wearing only a fur rug.
It was reported that she was performing an intimate act involving a Mars bar at the time, although she denied it, saying it was a tale put about by a vindictive policeman.
The fair-minded were inclined to believe her.
Candour was her custom, as she proved in her 1994 autobiography Faithfull, a kiss-and-tell memoir of sex and drugs and rock’n’roll. Had the Mars bar incident been true, she almost certainly would have freely owned the story.
The book was particularly cruel about Jagger, who was portrayed as a fastidious snob who was secretly in love with Richards. Faithfull later regretted some of her comments about him and suggested she had been pressurised by her publishers into making the book more salacious than she had wished.
That her life didn’t end with the 1960s was not for want of trying.
After losing Jagger’s child to a miscarriage at seven months, Faithfull was with the singer in Australia in 1969 when she discovered he was having an affair with the singer Marsha Hunt. High on drugs, she looked in a mirror and thought she saw staring back at her the face of Brian Jones, who had died a few weeks earlier.
It drove her to attempt to jump from the 14th-floor window of her hotel room. When she found the window was sealed shut, she instead took 150 barbiturate pills and spent six days in a coma.
Jagger packed her off to a Swiss clinic but it was the end of their relationship and her life wheeled out of control.
In 1971, on the day Jagger was marrying Bianca in Saint-Tropez, Faithfull was in a London jail on drugs charges. The following year she lost custody of her seven-year-old son because of her heroin addiction.
By the middle of the decade she was living in squats and on the wall of a half-demolished building in Soho.
“I sat there day after day, high as a kite,” she said. Eventually she was put on an NHS drugs program, which meant she could get a heroin prescription.
She wasted away to seven stone, had two front teeth knocked out in a brawl and – convinced that her looks were to blame for her troubles – took a razor blade to her face.
Yet oddly she remembered her time living on the street with a certain fondness.
“It made me realise that human beings were really good,” she recalled. “The Chinese restaurant let me wash my clothes there. The man who had the tea stall gave me free cups of tea and even the meth drinkers looked out for me.”
With the help of Chris Blackwell, owner of Island Records, she got back on her feet again to make the 1979 album Broken English, on which she unveiled her newly ravaged voice and explored the dark side of her existence.
The finest album of her career, the songs included Why Did Ya Do It?, the savage, snarling rant of a woman who has been wronged; What’s the Hurry?, a brutal song about drug abuse on which she sang “Do you hear me? Do you fear me?” with the relish of someone who knew where the bodies were buried, and The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, the tale of a middle-class housewife’s disillusionment and which was later used to brilliant effect in the 1991 film Thelma and Louise.
Her voice was no longer remotely beautiful but its characterful rasp perfectly suited the songs she was singing.
“I’m glad you can hear the experience in my voice. It’s an old thing that women are meant to sound pretty and feminine. That’s bullsh*t,” she declared with characteristic defiance.
Yet despite her successful recording comeback, it wasn’t until 1986 that she got clean of heroin, when she was finally persuaded to spend six months in a rehab clinic in America after falling down a flight of stairs while she was high and breaking her jaw.
What drew admiration as she rebuilt her career was that she refused to play the victim or to indulge in self-pity.
If many of her problems were self-inflicted, it could equally be argued that she was wronged and perhaps even ruined by the casual sexism and the unthinking excesses of the times.
Adversity was confronted with a fearlessness that enabled her to embark on the most productive and creative period of her career when she was in her fifties.
She appeared with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at London’s Royal Albert Hall and sang Brecht and Weill at Salzburg.
Her 1999 album, the splendidly titled Vagabond Ways, was another starkly autobiographical collection of songs, and her best since Broken English 20 years earlier.
She followed in 2001 with Kissin’ Time, an album of collaborations with the likes of Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker and Blur’s Damon Albarn. Three years later came Before the Poison, on which she collaborated with PJ Harvey and Nick Cave.
She also returned to acting, playing the part of the Devil in a 2004 production by Robert Wilson based on William Burroughs’ The Black Rider, which enjoyed runs in London and San Francisco.
She appeared in Sofia Coppola’s 2006 biopic Marie Antoinette, and starred in the 2007 film Irina Palm, in the lead role as a 60-year-old widow who becomes a sex worker to pay for medical treatment for a sick grandson.
She toured a show reading Shakespeare’s sonnets, drawing on the “Dark Lady” sequence, and even hospitalisation in 2020 with Covid-19 failed to halt her.
A year later she was back with the spoken word album She Walks in Beauty on which she recited verse by the 19th-century British Romantic poets, accompanied by musical arrangements from Brian Eno and Nick Cave among others.
She is survived by her son Nicholas Dunbar, a financial journalist, from her first marriage to John Dunbar. They married in 1965 after Faithfull had discovered she was pregnant. She left him for Jagger a year later.
For several years she was forbidden by a court order from seeing her son.
When they were reunited when he was in his teens, she was so nervous that the first thing she did was to offer him a spliff.
In the mid-1970s she was married to Ben Brierly of the punk band the Vibrators, a fellow addict with whom she lived in a squat.
She married her third husband Giorgio Della Terza, an American actor, in 1988 after encountering him at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. They divorced three years later.
She was briefly engaged in the early 1970s to Paddy (Lord) Rossmore (obituary May 7, 2021) who was 15 years older than her and attempted to wean her off heroin.
For several years in the late 1990s she lived with her manager Francois Ravard in homes in Ireland and France, although they never married.
Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull was born in 1946 in Hampstead, north London, the daughter of Glynn Faithfull, who had been a British spy during the Second World War, and Eva von Sacher-Masoch, a Viennese baroness descended from Leopold Baron von Sacher-Masoch, author of Venus in Furs.
Her father abandoned the family when she was six and she lost contact with him until 1994, when he wrote to her after the publication of her autobiography.
Her mother sent her to singing and elocution lessons but at the age of eight she was packed off to St Joseph’s convent in Reading, where she became “fascinated” by the smells and bells of Catholicism. Her religious conviction swiftly wore off in her teens and she left home in 1964 at the age of 17, after she was discovered at a party by the Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham. He thought she looked like “an angel with big breasts”, promised to make her a pop star and introduced her to Jagger and Richards.
For a while in the late 1960s her acting looked set to outstrip her career as a singer. She co-starred with Glenda Jackson in a 1967 production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Royal Court, was fetishised in tight black leather with nothing underneath in the 1968 film Girl on a Motorcycle, and was an acclaimed Ophelia opposite Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet in a 1969 Roundhouse production directed by Tony Richardson.
The promise was destroyed by her drug abuse, and it was another two decades before she revived her acting career, when she played Pirate Jenny in The Threepenny Opera at Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 1991.
Her lifestyle meant that she never saved any money and in later years lack of cash and a decent pension kept her working even in the face of poor health.
Surgery for breast cancer in 2006 was followed by a serious bout of hepatitis. Much of her 50th anniversary tour in 2014 was cancelled due to a broken hip and no sooner had she recovered from Covid-19 in 2020 than she went down with pneumonia.
Yet she carried on until she was eventually forced to admit defeat in 2022 when she moved into Denville Hall, a care home for former entertainment industry professionals in north London where Lord Attenborough, Sheila Sim and Andrew Sachs spent their last days.
“I don’t feel cursed,” she said in one of her final interviews, still refusing to feel sorry for herself. “I just feel f***ing human.”
(Marianne Faithfull, singer-songwriter and actress, was born on December 29, 1946. She died from undisclosed causes on January 30, 2025, aged 78)
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