By Alistair Bell
(Reuters) – Marianne Faithfull, the wild woman of London’s Swinging ’60s who survived drug addiction, homelessness, two comas, cancer and COVID-19, 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,” her spokesperson said in a statement on Thursday.
“Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed.”
The convent-educated daughter of a World War Two 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 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, Faithfull always 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 wrote in a post on social media platform X. “She will always be remembered,” he added.
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.”
“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,” a collection of Romantic-era poems read by her and set to music.
She later complained of symptoms of “long COVID,” such as tiredness, breathing problems and lack of memory and had to cut short a podcast interview in June 2021.
In March 2022, Faithfull was moved into Denville Hall, a retirement home in London that houses actors and other professional performers, according to several media reports.
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 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, forming the “It Couple” of London’s psychedelic scene. Faithfull contributed backing vocals to the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” single and helped inspire the Stones’ “Sympathy For The Devil.”
But much of her fame came from her involvement in drug- and drink-fueled 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.
Faithfull said she had taken a bath when the police entered the house and so 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 and 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. As a street addict in London, I finally found it. I had no telephone, no address,” she wrote in her autobiography.
The experience was grist for the mill for her gritty 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 University of Oxford to study literature, comparative religion and philosophy but instead got another kind of education.
“You know, 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. 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.
(Reporting by Alistair Bell; editing by Diane Craft)
