NEW YORK (AP) — Marianne Faithfull, the British pop star, muse, libertine, and old soul who inspired and helped write some of the Rolling Stones’ best songs and endured as a ballad singer and survivor of the lifestyle she once embodied, has passed away. She was 78 years old.
Faithfull passed away on Thursday in London, as reported by her music promotion company, Republic Media.
"It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of singer, songwriter, and actress Marianne Faithfull," said a spokesperson for the company in a statement. "Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, surrounded by her beloved family. She will be greatly missed."
The blonde and voluptuous Faithfull was a celebrity before turning 17, found herself homeless in her mid-20s, and was an inspiration to her contemporaries and younger artists in her early 30s when her raw and explicit album "Broken English" brought her the kind of criticism that the Stones had received. Among her admirers were Beck, Billy Corgan, Nick Cave, and PJ Harvey, although her story would always be closely linked to the Stones and the years she dated Mick Jagger.
One of the first songs written by Jagger and Keith Richards, the melancholic "As Tears Go By," was their breakout hit when it was released in 1964 and marked the beginning of their close and tumultuous relationship with the band.
She and Jagger started dating in 1966 and became one of the most glamorous and notorious couples of "Swinging London". Faithfull once declared that if LSD "was not meant to happen, it would not have been invented". Their rejection of conventional values was defined by a widely publicized drug arrest in 1967 that left Jagger and Richards briefly in jail and Faithfull identified in the tabloids as "Naked girl at the Stones' party", a label she would find humiliating and inescapable.
"One of the dangers of reforming your bad ways is that some people will not stop seeing you in their minds as a wild creature," he wrote in "Memories, Dreams and Reflections," his 2007 autobiography.
Jagger and Richards often cited blues musicians and early rockers as their main influences, but Faithfull and her close friend Anita Pallenberg, Richards' long-time partner, also introduced the band to new ways of thinking. Both women were more worldly than their boyfriends at the time and encouraged them to transform the songwriting and personalities of the Stones, either as muses or collaborators.
Faithfull helped inspire songs by the Stones such as the sweet tribute "She Smiled Sweetly" and the lustful "Let's Spend the Night Together". It was Faithfull who lent Jagger the Russian novel "The Master and Margarita" which served as the basis for "Sympathy for the Devil" and who first recorded and contributed lyrics to the dark "Sister Morphine" by the Stones, which begins with the verse, "Here I lie in my hospital bed". Faithfull's drug use helped shape such disillusioned visions of 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 their most vulnerable love songs, "Wild Horses".
On her own, Londoner Faithfull initially specialized in gentle ballads, including "Come Stay With Me," "Summer Nights," and "This Little Bird." But even in her adolescence, Faithfull sang in a fragile high voice that suggested knowledge and burdens far beyond her years. Her voice would later crack and become rougher, and her life and work after parting ways with Jagger in 1970 were about looking back and moving forward through emotional and physical pain.
She had become addicted to heroin in the late 60s, suffered a miscarriage when she was seven months pregnant, and almost died from an overdose of sleeping pills. (Jagger, meanwhile, had a romance with Pallenberg and had a baby with actress Marsha Hunt). In the early 70s, Faithfull was living on the streets of London and had lost custody of her son, Nicholas, whom she had with her husband, the gallery owner John Dunbar, from whom she had distanced herself. She also battled 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 in "Broken English," which was released in 1979 and featured her furious "Why'd Ya Do It" and the conflicted "Guilt," in which she sings "I feel guilt, I feel guilt, though I know I've done no wrong." Other albums included "Dangerous Acquaintances," "Strange Weather," the live album "Blazing Away," and, more recently, "She Walks in Beauty." Although Faithfull was defined by the 1960s, her sensibility often harked back to the pre-rock world of German cabaret; she also performed 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 expanded 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 theatrical roles in Chekhov's "Hamlet" and "Three Sisters." She later appeared in films such as "Marie Antoinette" and "The Girl from Nagasaki," and in the television series "Absolutely Fabulous," where she was cast as — and did not hesitate to play — God.
Faithfull was married three times, and in recent years she dated her manager, Francois Ravard. Jagger was her most famous lover, but other men in her life included Richards ("so cool and unforgettable," she would say of their one-night affair), David Bowie, and early rock star Gene Pitney. Among those rejected: Bob Dylan, who was so captivated 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," her other memoir published in 1994. "He went to the typewriter, grabbed a stack of papers, and started tearing them into smaller and smaller pieces, after which he dropped them into the wastebasket."
Faithfull's inheritance was one of intrigue, decadence, and fallen empires. Her father was a British intelligence officer during World War II who helped save her mother from the Nazis in Vienna. Faithfull's distant ancestors included several Austro-Hungarian aristocrats and Count Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a 19th-century Austrian whose surname and scandalous novel "Venus in Furs" helped create the term "masochism."
Faithfull's parents separated when she was 6 years old, and her childhood would include time in a convent and what she would describe as a "crazy" sex-obsessed commune. In her adolescence, she read Simone de Beauvoir, listened to Odetta and Joan Baez, and sang 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 small scenes intertwined invisibly," he wrote in his memoir. "All these people — gallery owners, photographers, pop stars, aristocrats, and various talented layabouts more or less invented the scene in London, so I guess I was present at its creation."
Her future was set in March 1964, when she attended a recording party for one of London's young and popular bands, The Rolling Stones. She rejected the idea that she and Jagger fell in love immediately, Faithfull said she considered the Stones as "rude schoolboys" and witnessed Jagger fighting with his then-girlfriend, model Chrissie Shrimpton, who was so tearful that her false eyelashes were coming off.
But she was deeply impressed by a man, the manager of the Stones, Andrew "Loog" Oldham, who seemed "powerful, dangerous, and very self-assured." A week later, Oldham sent her a telegram, asking her to come to Olympic Studios in London. With Jagger and Richards watching, Oldham played her a demo of a "very primitive" song, "As Tears Go By," which Faithfull only needed two takes to complete.
“It's absolutely amazing that a 20-year-old boy had written that,” Faithfull wrote in her 1994 memoir. “A song about a woman nostalgically looking back on her life. The strange thing is that Mick wrote those words long before it all happened. It's almost as if our entire relationship had been prefigured in that song.”
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This story was translated from English by an AP editor with the help of a generative artificial intelligence tool.