Marianne Faithfull, who transcended It girl status in the Sixties with a stunning second act as a singer-songwriter of earned hard wisdom, died Thursday at age 78.
“It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter, and actress Marianne Faithfull,” the singer’s rep said in a statement. “Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family.”
Born Dec. 29, 1946, Faithfull was raised in the Hampstead neighborhood of London. Her father worked in British intelligence and her mother was a baroness. Her parents broke up when she was six and Faithfull spent time in a convent. As a teenager, she dabbled in acting and folk singing.
But after meeting producer Andrew Loog Oldham at a party, Faithfull became a breakout star in 1964 with her first single, the ballad “As Tears Go By,” the first song Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote together. Although she was only 17 and sang in a voice that sounded frail and very young, Faithfull imbued the song and its lyrics about feeling left out with a conviction that would point the way toward her later work.
Faithfull continued to score hits throughout the mid Sixties, but controversy overshadowed much of her early career. She was in a relationship with Jagger from 1966 until 1970, and was pilloried by the press after police raided Richards’ flat for drugs and found her nude, save for a fur bedcover, in 1967. “My heartfelt condolences to Marianne’s family!” Richards wrote on social media. “I am so sad and will miss her!!”
Jagger wrote on social media Thursday, “I am so saddened to hear of the death of Marianne Faithfull. She was so much part of my life for so long. She was a wonderful friend, a beautiful singer and a great actress. She will always be remembered.”
A few hits followed before Faithfull disappeared from the spotlight in a haze of heroin addiction (trials she chronicled in the lyrics to “Sister Morphine,” which the Rolling Stones also recorded).
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Toward the end of the Sixties, Faithfull was homeless and addicted to heroin. Asked by Rolling Stone in 2021 whether dating Jagger made her a stronger woman, Faithfull replied, “I don’t know if it did. It almost destroyed me. Although it was wonderful, it was only four years. It was a wonderful time, and he was great, but I don’t think I fit into that life or what he wanted in a woman, that’s all. I couldn’t do it.”
In 1979, Faithfull reemerged with Broken English, an album that drew musically from punk and New Wave and showcased her newfound dark, sometimes vulgar outlook, and a more ravaged but even more powerful singing voice. Its songs, like “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” “Guilt,” and a cover of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero,” perfectly fit the way her voice had deepened during her time away. Broken English would earn Faithfull a Grammy nomination for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance.
As she told The New York Times soon after, she, unlike some of her old friends and peers, loved punk rock. “When the Sex Pistols and all those punk bands came along, they were so much like what rock & roll was like for me when I first got involved in it,” she said. “They weren’t that different than what the Rolling Stones were like in the beginning, really. I don’t think I would have had the audacity to come out of hiding and make Broken English if the punk thing hadn’t happened.”
“When Marianne Faithfull came out with Broken English, I was so taken with her sound, and her voice,” said Cyndi Lauper in a tribute post. “So radically deep, rich, and wonderful.”
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Addiction followed Faithfull into the Eighties, but she eventually cleaned up in mid-decade before redefining herself again with the 1987’s jazzy, cabaret-influenced Strange Weather, which featured a new rendition of “As Tears Go By. Over the next 40 years, she stayed the course, singing about love and relationships against dramatic musical backdrops.
In recent years, she recorded songs by PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Roger Waters, Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan, among others. Her 2009 album, Easy Come, Easy Go, produced by her friend Hal Willner, found her covering songs by Nick Cave, Chan Marshall, Rufus Wainwright, and Keith Richards. She also wrote two candid memoirs, Faithfull and Memories, Dreams & Reflections.
In recent years, Faithfull battled a number of health setbacks. In addition to a hepatitis C diagnosis, she received treatment for breast cancer in 2016, and underwent shoulder-replacement surgery two years later. In 2020, she nearly died after contracting Covid-19.
At various points of her career, she revisited “As Tears Go By” several times, and marveled in a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone about how profound the song was. “I still sing it every night,” she said. “I still think it’s a beautiful song. I’m still very grateful that Mick and Keith gave it to me and wrote it for me. I suddenly really understood it myself when I was about 40, when I realized it was another version of [poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ballad] ‘The Lady of Shalott.’ It hit me during one of my moments of clarity, which I’ve told you seem to happen periodically. That moment of clarity was when I got clean.”
As Faithfull said in 2016 of her early days, “Well, it was a difficult time to be so pretty, so I’d say be careful not to attract the wrong men. I can’t think of anything else. I’ve had a great life. I’ve had my ups and downs, but it’s been wonderful.”
This story is developing.
