Marianne Faithfull, singer and actress, 1946-2025
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Marianne Faithfull, singer and actress, 1946-2025

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“Can she sing?” So Andrew Loog Oldham, head of The Rolling Stones, asked at a party in 1964, clearly ignored Marianne Faithfull’s presence and instead addressed the 17-year-old’s boyfriend. Yes: She could sing, initially in a sweet folk-pop vibrato with a lot of English diction, since later-more life later-later-the weather-bitten tones of hard experience.

Faithfull’s career, if the prosaic term can be applied to such a free spirit, was launched by Hustling Oldham. He promoted her, with her words, as “an eerie fusion of court -fashioned aristocrat and popular bohemian children’s woman”. There was a truth grain to the imagination. Faithfull was born in 1946 to an Austrian-Hungarian Baroness who moved to England after marrying an eccentric British intelligence service. Marriage founded, a war time Foil d’Amour. Faithfull raised by her mother as a penal blue blood. From her she learned the intoxicating but destructive habit of living over one’s means.

Her first single was Françoise Hardy-style ballad “As Tears Go By”, which was also the first song written by Jagger and his Stones partner, Keith Richards. A chart success in 1964, which preceded Stone’s version after a year, triggered a run of hit singles. But Faithfull did not like pop star. In the description of her amazing memoir from 1994 FaithfulShe was bedded by “Groteske contract, lying, cheated cunning legalisms, crazy and bungling managers and barbaric schedules”.

A woman sits in a couch between two men; She is attentive to one of them
Faithfull with Alain Delon, Left and Mick Jagger in 1967 © Patrice Habans/Paris Match via Getty

The relief of a kind came with entry into Stone’s inner shrine. She was attracted to Richards at first and culminated in “A Wonderful Night of Sex” with the guitarist while she stumbled at LSD as she reminded Faithful. Afterwards, to her surprise, guitarist Breezily said her to give the “beaten” jagger a conversation: “Continue, love, give him a jingle, he will fall off the chair.”

Emblematically for the group’s inclined complicated dynamics, she and Jagger became the golden pair of the swinging sixties. Almost 20 when she moved in with him in 1966, she arrived with a baby son from an unsolved marriage with gallerist John Dunbar. She continued to release records and also had a successful sideline that acted in high -profile games and movies. But her work is overshadowed by her life off the stage.

After having business with women and men, her mind opened with LSD and Hasj, she embodied the spirit of the time of freedom. But there were also risks. Lurid is lying about sexual destruction circulated after Jagger and Richards were arrested in the infamous Redlands -Drosten in 1967, where faithful was present, dressed in a fur mat and nothing else. An almost deadly overdose of sleeping pills in Australia in 1969 caused a conservative MP to dubb her “a rather stupid young lady” in a debate about the house.

Pop Ingénue had been frightened as a monster of corruption. But Faithfull’s hedonism had an innocent quality. She gave herself to sensual pleasure wholeheartedly. When she sang in “Guilt”, from her landmark album in 1979 Broken English: “I never lied to my lover/But if I did, I would admit it.”

A woman sits next to a Dalmatian dog; Woman adopts a similar pose - her hands under the chin - to the woman in a painting behind her
Faithfull with its pet Dalmatian, 1964 © John Pratt/Getty

Her views were formed by romantic poetry, aesthetics and decadent literature (her mother descended from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of Erotic Noella Venus in fur). When she wrote together the lyrics to the song “Sister Morphine”, she drew John Milton’s poem “Lycidas” for inspiration. Released by Faithfull 1969 (The Stones’ version followed in 1971) and brought her descent to heroin addiction.

In 1970 she broke up with Jagger. In the years to come, her Nadir, a time of alcoholism, drug addiction and a period of homelessness in central London during which she lost custody of her son. The spiral was unexpectedly arrested in 1979 by Broken English. Its New Wave Sound and Faithfull’s abused but uncomfortable voice established kinship with a post-punk generation that rejected the Rolling Stones and their ILK as Out -of-Touch Rock Aristocrats.

She continued to live a challenging personal life, did not end heroin until 1985. Survived by her son Nicholas Dunbar, she was married three times. But the woman who unwillingly submitted the role of muse to Jagger (“So destroying for anyone trying to be an artist in her own right” released a total of 21 studio albums. She was a cult figure for collaborators like Jarvis Cocker and Nick Cave, worthy as the symbol for rock Survivor. Her philosophy was encapsulated by one of her favorite poems, William Blake, quoted in her memoir: “You never know what is enough if you don’t know what’s more than enough.”