Marianne Faithfull, British singer and pop icon, dies at 78

NEW YORK — Marianne Faithfull, the British pop star, muse, libertine and old soul who inspired and helped write some of the Rolling Stones' 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.

Marianne Faithfull Obit — FILE - British actress and singer Marianne Faithfull poses during a photo-call for her movie 'Irina Palm' at the 57th International Film Festival Berlin 'Berlinale' in Berlin, Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2007. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)
Markus Schreiber

"It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull," a company spokesperson said in a statement. "Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed."

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.

"I am so saddened to hear of the death of Marianne Faithfull," Jagger wrote on Instagram. "She was so much a part of my life for so long. She was a wonderful friend, a beautiful singer and a great actress."

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 "Swinging London," with Faithfull once declaring that if LSD "wasn't meant to happen, it wouldn't have been invented." 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 "Naked Girl At Stones Party," a label she would find humiliating and inescapable.

"One of the hazards of reforming your evil ways is that some people won't let go of their mind's eye of you as a wild thing," she wrote in "Memories, Dreams and Reflections," a 2007 memoir.

Jagger and Richards often cited bluesmen and early rock 'n rollers as their prime influences, but Faithfull and her close friend Anita Pallenberg, Richards' longtime partner, also opened the band to new ways of thinking. Both were worldlier than their boyfriends at the time, and helped transform the Stones' songwriting and personas, whether as muses or as collaborators.

Faithfull helped inspire such Stones songs as the mellow tribute "She Smiled Sweetly" and the lustful "Let's 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 Stones' dire "Sister Morphine," notably the opening line, "Here I lie in my hospital bed." Faithfull's drug use helped shape such jaded takes on the London rock scene as "You Can't 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 '60s, 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 '70s, 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 "Why'd Ya Do It" and conflicted "Guilt," in which she chants "I feel guilt, I feel guilt, though I know I've done no wrong." 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 Soldier's Wife" and the "sung" ballet "The Seven Deadly Sins."

Her interests extended to theater, film and television. Faithfull began acting in the 1960s, including an appearance in Jean-Luc Godard's "Made In U.S.A." and stage roles in "Hamlet" and Chekhov's "Three Sisters." She would later appear in such films as "The Girl on a Motorcycle," "Marie Antoinette" and "The Girl from Nagasaki," and the TV series "Absolutely Fabulous," in which she was cast as — and did not flinch from playing — God.

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 ("so great and memorable," 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.

"Without warning, he turned into Rumpelstiltskin," she wrote in "Faithfull," published in 1994. "He 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."

Faithfull's 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. Faithfull's 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 "masochism."

Faithfull's parents separated when she was 6 and her childhood would include time in a convent and in what she would call a "nutty" 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.

"The threads of a dozen little scenes were invisibly twining together," she wrote in her memoir. "All these people — 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."

Her future was set in March 1964, when she attended a recording party for one of London's hot young bands, the Rolling Stones. Scorning the idea that she and Jagger immediately fell for each other, she would regard the Stones as "yobby schoolboys" 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 "Loog" Oldham, who looked "powerful and dangerous and very sure of himself." A week later, Oldham sent her a telegram, asking her to come to London's Olympic Studios. With Jagger and Richards looking on, Oldham played her a demo of a "very primitive" song, "As Tears Go By," which Faithfull needed just two takes to complete.

"It's an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of 20 to have written," Faithfull wrote in her 1994 memoir. "A 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. It's almost as is if our whole relationship was prefigured in that song."

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Brian Melley contributed from London.