Marianne Faithfull.Photo: David Redfern/Redferns/Getty
Marianne Faithfull, the British singer and actress who was widely known as the crown princess of Swinging Sixties London, has died.
“Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed.”
A cause of death was not immediately available.
Faithfull, whose music career was often discussed in the same breath as her romantic liaisons with stars likeMick Jaggerand her struggles with substance abuse, hadcontracted COVID-19 in April 2020, and dealt with long-term side effects such as memory and lung problems as well as fatigue.
The “As Tears Go By” singer was born in Hampstead, London in December 1946 to Eva von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso, and Major Glynn Faithfull, a British Intelligence officer, who separated when she was 6.
Marianne Faithfull in Dublin in February 2008.Phillip Massey/FilmMagic
Though the song was a hit, Faithfull was never among its biggest fans.
“I was never that crazy about ‘As Tears Go By,'” she wrote in her 1994 autobiographyFaithfull. “[It] was a marketable portrait of me and as such is an extremely ingenious creation, a commercial fantasy that pushes all the right buttons.”
As the ’60s continued, so too did Faithfull’s career, which expanded to the silver screen thanks to acting roles in films like 1967’sGirl on a Motorcycleand stage productions likeThree SistersandHamlet.
Marianne Faithfull in London in February 2009.Christie Goodwin/Redferns/Getty
Though she’d married first husband John Dunbar as an 18-year-old in 1965, and welcomed son Nicholas that same year, she left him shortly after to pursue a relationship with Jagger, which catapulted the pair to “It Couple” status. Faithfull is long believed to have been the inspiration behind Stones classics like “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Wild Horses.”
“You know, being a woman in rock ‘n’ roll didn’t show me kindness,” Faithfull told BritishVoguein April 2021. “Though that’s not to say that Mick was unkind – he wasn’t. Mick and Keith [Richards] and Charlie [Watts] were really kind – but a lot of people weren’t.”
By the time she and Jagger split in 1970 (“He wasn’t the great love of my life. We were just two kids living on too many different levels,” she told PEOPLE in 1980) her career was splintering as well thanks to excessive drug use, sporadic homelessness and a battle with anorexia nervosa. Stories such as the six days she spent in a coma in 1969 afteroverdosing on sleeping pillssoon came to overshadow her career.
“[I was] dependent on every possible neurotic thing – heroin, coke, pills, alcohol, sex and money,” she wrote inFaithfull, calling herself a “garden-variety drug addict.” “The first year I was in treatment I was dying to uncover a serious psychosis that I could pin it all on, but nothing like that ever showed up. My headlong descent had much more to do with a willful and heedless pursuit of hedonism.”
Marianne Faithfull in January 1967.Getty
Though she attempted several comebacks in the ’70s, her most successful was the critically acclaimed 1979 albumBroken English, a showcase for the ways in which her excessive drug use and laryngitis had transformed her lilting, melodic voice into something more gritty and raspy.
By the ’80s, she’d developed a blusier and more jazzy sound, which she put on display in 1987’sStrange Weather. The album featured the first of her two “As Tears Go By” re-recordings; she gave the track a third go in 2018 on her albumNegative Capability.
During this time, she also married twice: first to the Vibrators rocker Ben Brierly in 1979, and then to Giorgio della Terza, from whom she split in 1991 after three years of marriage. She later dated her manager, French record producer François Ravard, for 15 years before they parted ways in 2009, according to theGuardian.
Marianne Faithfull circa 1970.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
“I get married, you know, when I don’t know what else to do. It’s one of my panic things,” she wrote inFaithfull, later telling BritishVoguethat “the thing that always ruined my relationships was drugs.”
In recent years, Faithfull continued to churn out a steady stream of records, most recently in 2021 with the spoken word albumShe Walks in Beauty, which served as a tribute to Romantic-era poets like Keats, Byron and Shelley.
Despite her work — she also appeared in a stage production ofThe Seven Deadly Sinsin 2012 — Faithfull faced many a health scare, including breast cancer and hepatitis C.
“Being very young and silly, I was drawn to everything that was as decadent as possible. I am [74] and I’m paying for all that,” she toldVoguein 2021. “I really wish I had never had a cigarette, particularly, or any drug or alcohol in my life. I didn’t know when I was in my [20s]…what it would do to me. I always thought I would die young, I never expected to get to this age.”
source: people.com
