Marianne Faithfull, the 60s icon who carved her own path
2025-01-31
Category: entertainment

By her own admission, Marianne Faithfull, who has died aged 78, "didn't do conventional".She was the convent-educated teenager who abandoned school after meeting the Rolling Stones.A delicate-featured picture of innocence, she inhaled the highs of chart success, before falling victim to alcohol and hard drugs.After splitting up with Mick Jagger, Faithfull spent years living as a heroin addict on the streets of Soho.Given the chance to restart her singing career, she went on to make more than 20 albums. Her whisky-soaked voice, turned cracked and dusky, conveyed the inner torments of her painful life-experiences.
Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull was born in Hampstead on 29 December 1946.Her mother was Baroness Eva Sacher-Masoch, a Hungarian, half-Jewish former ballet dancer who had fled the Nazis in World War II.Her father was Major Glyn Faithfull, an eccentric British MI6 agent turned professor of Italian literature.The stage was set for an unusual childhood.Marianne spent her early years at Braziers Park, an upmarket commune founded by her father in an Oxfordshire country house.In her autobiography, she described it as a "mixture of high utopian thoughts and randy sex".
After divorcing, Lady Sacher-Masoch spirited her six-year-old daughter to a terraced house in Reading, discouraging further contact with Major Faithfull. According to Marianne, she was raised like "one of her mother's cats".She had regular bouts of tuberculosis and was sent to St Joseph's Roman Catholic boarding school, despite her father's complaints that the nuns would "give her a problem with sex for the rest of her life".While still at school, Marianne began singing folk songs a cappella in Reading coffee-houses - and, before long, her exquisite looks and obvious talent saw her sucked into the vortex of Swinging 60s London.In 1964, she attended a Rolling Stones launch party, on the arm of British artist John Dunbar, and was spotted by the flamboyant record producer Andrew Loog Oldham.Famously, he described her as an "angel" with impressive vital statistics.
Oldham was the Rolling Stones' manager and felt he could package his new discovery as a pop star.She would, he thought, be a useful vehicle for songs that weren't quite a fit for his more important act.The Rolling Stones were a rhythm and blues band. When singer Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards wrote a gentle ballad, When Tears Go By, they dismissed it as a "piece of tripe".So Oldham gave it to Marianne Faithfull.
The song had not been written for her but, she said, "fitted me so perfectly it might as well had been".The melancholy classic, sung in her detached, wintry voice, reached the UK Top 10.The Stones were so disappointed they had missed a hit, they recorded their own version a year later.Faithfull followed up with a series of singles, including Summer Nights, This Little Bird and - her highest chart success - Come and Stay with Me.
She caught Bob Dylan's eye when he came to town. Inspired by her doe-eyed looks, the American singer-songwriter wrote her a poem - but tore it up when she turned him down.In 1965, she married John Dunbar and gave birth to their son. Soon afterwards, she left the family home and moved in with Mick Jagger.He was not Faithfull's first Rolling Stone. "I slept with three of them," she later admitted, "and then I decided the lead singer was the best bet."Her influence on the band was significant.Let's Spend the Night Together, You Can't Always Get What You Want and Wild Horses were all songs said to have been written about her.And Sympathy for the Devil was inspired by The Master and Margarita, a Russian novel Faithfull introduced to Jagger.
As one of the faces of the 1960s, Faithfull carved out a side-career as an actor.She appeared at London's Royal Court in an adaptation of Chekhov's Three Sisters, alongside Glenda Jackson.She became the first person ever to utter the F-word in a mainstream film, I'll Never Forget What'sisname, in 1967.A year later, she starred opposite Alain Delon, as a doomed, leather-clad beauty in The Girl on a Motorcycle. Her character's psychedelic and erotic fantasies saw the film win the first ever X-rating in the United States.Of course, there were a lot of drugs.During a police raid on Keith Richards' house in Sussex, Faithfull was discovered naked, draped in a fur rug - which she took indecent pleasure in occasionally letting slip.Allegations involving a Mars bar, she insisted, were entirely made up. But the drugs bust took a toll on her reputation. "It destroyed me," she later said."To be a male drug addict and to act like that is always enhancing and glamorising, she explained. "A woman in that situation becomes a slut and a bad mother."
Faithfull co-wrote Sister Morphine with Jagger and Richards and released the song in 1969.The lyrics - the authorship of which were later the subject of a legal dispute with the band - are a terrifying insight into the effect of heroin and cocaine addiction: "The scream of the ambulance is sounding in my ears. Tell me, Sister Morphine, how long have I been lying here?"The relationship with Jagger - whom she accused of having a misogynistic streak - fell apart at the turn of the decade.At the same time, Faithfull lost custody of her son and her life began to spiral out of control.A suicide attempt left her in a coma, and she ended up an alcoholic, anorexic heroin addict living in a bomb-damaged building in London's Soho.She looked back on these years in a BBC interview in 2002, describing her addiction as a kind of brutal therapy."I was in agony and I healed myself as best I could," she said. "One of the ways was with drugs, because they are painkillers."It was all too much for me," she explained. "I really didn't like my gilded cage."
Occasional attempts to emerge from her squat in Chelsea failed.Her voice - affected by drug abuse and laryngitis - had become permanently rough and lower in pitch.But, a decade after her split with Jagger, Faithfull made Broken English - her most critically acclaimed album.Gone was the innocence of the 1960s - and in its place, a post-punk performer of depth and world-weary experience.The album's final track, Why'd Ya Do It?, is the rasping rant of a woman reacting to a man's infidelity - set to a riff inspired by Jimi Hendrix.It was a moment of metamorphosis: the Rolling Stone party-girl had become a gravel-voiced, truth-telling sophisticate.The album's critical success was not matched commercially. It did well in France and Germany but reached just number 57 in the UK charts.But it did earn Faithfull a Grammy nomination in 1981, for best female rock vocal performance.
She moved to America, where Island Records put her into rehab.Still suffering from alcohol and drug addiction, she had a string of mishaps - including breaking her jaw on the stairs. On one occasion, her heart actually stopped.But she held it together, and released more than a dozen albums over the next three decades.She also wrote an autobiography, Faithfull - looking back on the 1960s and 70s with a notable absence of self-pity.Constantly worried about money, she auctioned off much of her 1960s memorabilia in 2024 - saying that she preferred gardening to looking back.Now in her late 70s, she had inherited her mother's ancient title and - technically a baroness - was living in Paris.In the last decade of her life, Faithfull had to cancel concert tours after being diagnosed first with breast cancer and then hepatitis C.She was also troubled by the complications of a broken back and hip, and thought she would never sing again after weeks in hospital with the coronavirus.
But she never quite lost the creative spark.In recent years, she published a record that put the words of Keats and Wordsworth to music.And Negative Capability, her 21st album, was described by the Guardian as a "masterly mediation on ageing and death".It was notable for They Come at Night, her furious response to the Bataclan terror in Paris."They come at night," she sang, "and the world goes blind with fear. Terror in Paris, the future is here."It also dealt with Faithfull's own increasing frailty and loneliness, as well as the loss of close friends, including fellow Rolling Stones muse Anita Pallenberg."I know I'm not young and I'm damaged," she wrote defiantly. "But I'm still pretty kind of funny."Marianne Faithfull will in part be remembered for being Mick Jagger's girlfriend and surviving the horrors of drink and drug addiction.But her resurrection proved - if proof were needed - a rock star's muse can become a fully fledged, respected artist in her own right.