English singer and actress Marianne Faithfull dies aged 78

LONDON – Marianne Faithfull, the wild woman of London’s Swinging Sixties who survived drug addiction, homelessness, two comas, cancer and Covid-19, has died at age 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,” said her spokesperson in a statement on Jan 30. “Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed.”

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 globally with the breezy early tunes of rock bands The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

The former girlfriend of Stones’ frontman Mick Jagger, Faithfull fell casualty to heroin addiction and anorexia when the relationship ended, spending two years living on the streets of London’s Soho district in the early 1970s. But  no matter how hard she fell, she bounced back.

She released 21 solo albums – including the critically acclaimed Broken English in 1979 that won her a Grammy nomination – wrote three autobiographies and had a film acting career.

“I am so saddened to hear of the death of Marianne Faithfull. She was so much part of my life for so long,” Jagger, 81, wrote in a post on social media platform X. “She was a wonderful friend, a beautiful singer and a great actress. She will always be remembered.”

Faithfull’s most recent comeback was in 2020, when she caught Covid-19 in the early days of the pandemic and fell into a coma during a three-week stay at a hospital.

Her son Nicholas later told her the medical staff were so sure she would not recover that they wrote a note at the chart at the bottom of her bed recommending “palliative care only”.

“They thought I was going to croak,” Faithfull told The New York Times in April 2021.

But she got better and, within a year, she finished the album she had been working on before falling sick: She Walks In Beauty (2021), a collection of Romantic-era poems read by her and set to music.

She later complained of long Covid symptoms – such as tiredness, breathing problems and a lack of memory – and had to cut short a podcast interview in June 2021.

In March 2022, she was moved to Denville Hall, a retirement home in London that houses actors and other professional performers, according to media reports.

Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull was born on Dec 29, 1946, in London. Her father was a British intelligence officer who interrogated prisoners of war, while her mother was closely related to 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.  

Her formative years were in the swinging London of the mid-1960s, when she was a budding folk singer.

At 18, she married and had a son, but attended a party that changed her life. There, she met Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who launched her pop 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, forming the “It Couple” of London’s psychedelic scene. Faithfull contributed backing vocals to The Beatles’ single Yellow Submarine (1966) and helped inspire the Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil (1968).

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. Her most notorious caper was perhaps when the police came across her, wrapped in a bearskin rug, during a drugs raid at Stones guitarist 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 taken a bath when the police entered the house and she grabbed the nearest thing, a rug, to cover up. 

She complained that double standards for women meant that she was slandered, while the arrests helped boost the image of Jagger and Richards as rock outlaws.

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. She spent two years living on the streets of London as an anorexic heroin addict after she and Jagger split in 1970.

Among the squalor, she found an upside.

“For me, being a junkie was an admirable life. It was total anonymity, something I hadn’t known since I was 17,” she wrote in her autobiography. “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 gritty album Broken English (1979), 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 such as Jagger, as well as The Beatles’ Paul McCartney and John Lennon.

She had planned to attend the University of Oxford to study literature, comparative religion and philosophy, but instead got another kind of education. 

“I didn’t go to Oxford, but I went to Olympic Studios and watched The Rolling Stones record, and I watched The Beatles record as well,” she told British newspaper The Guardian in 2021. “I watched the best people working and how they worked and, because of Mick, I guess, I watched people writing, too – a brilliant artiste at the top of his game. I watched how he wrote, and I learnt a lot, and I will always be grateful.” REUTERS