“I am so saddened to hear of the death of Marianne Faithfull,” Jagger wrote on Instagram. “She was so much a part of my life for so long. She was a wonderful friend, a beautiful singer and a great actress.”
One of the first songs written by Jagger and Keith Richards, the melancholy As Tears Go By, was her breakthrough hit when released in 1964 and the start of her close and tormented relationship with the band.
She and Jagger began seeing each other in 1966 and became one of the most glamorous and notorious couples of “Swinging London”, with Faithfull once declaring that if LSD “wasn’t meant to happen, it wouldn’t have been invented”. Their rejection of conventional values was defined by a widely publicised 1967 drug bust that left Jagger and Richards briefly in jail and Faithfull identified in tabloids as “Naked Girl At Stones Party”, a label she would find humiliating and inescapable.
“One of the hazards of reforming your evil ways is that some people won’t let go of their mind’s eye of you as a wild thing,” she wrote in Memories, Dreams And Reflections, a 2007 memoir.
Jagger and Richards often cited bluesmen and early rock ‘n rollers as their prime influences, but Faithfull and her close friend Anita Pallenberg, Richards’ longtime partner, also opened the band to new ways of thinking. Both were worldlier than their boyfriends at the time, and helped transform the Stones’ songwriting and personas, whether as muses or as collaborators.
Faithfull helped inspire such Stones songs as the mellow tribute She Smiled Sweetly and the lustful Let’s Spend The Night Together. It was Faithful who lent Jagger the Russian novel The Master And Margarita that was the basis for Sympathy For The Devil and who first recorded and contributed lyrics to the Stones’ dire Sister Morphine, notably the opening line, “Here I lie in my hospital bed”. Faithfull’s drug use helped shape such jaded takes on 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 his most vulnerable love songs, Wild Horses.
On her own, the London-born Faithfull specialised at first in genteel ballads, among them Come Stay With Me, Summer Nights and This Little Bird. But even in her teens, Faithfull sang in a fragile alto that suggested knowledge and burdens far beyond her years. Her voice would later crack and coarsen, and her life and work after splitting with Jagger in 1970 was one of looking back and carrying on through emotional and physical pain.
She had become addicted to heroin in the late ’60s, suffered a miscarriage while seven months pregnant and nearly died from an overdose of sleeping pills. (Jagger, meanwhile, had an affair with Pallenberg and had a baby with actor Marsha Hunt). By the early ’70s, Faithfull was living in the streets of London and had lost custody of the son, Nicholas, she had with her estranged husband, the gallery owner John Dunbar. She would also battle anorexia and hepatitis, was treated for breast cancer, broke her hip in a fall and was hospitalised with COVID-19 in 2020.
She shared everything, uncensored, in her memoirs and in her music, notably Broken English, which came out in 1979 and featured her seething Why’d Ya Do It and conflicted Guilt, in which she chants “I feel guilt, I feel guilt, though I know I’ve done no wrong”. Other albums included Dangerous Acquaintances, Strange Weather, the live Blazing Away and, most recently, She Walks In Beauty. Though Faithfull was defined by the 1960s, her sensibility often reached back to the pre-rock world of German cabaret, and she covered 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 extended to theatre, film and television. Faithfull began acting in the 1960s, including an appearance in Jean-Luc Godard’s Made In USA and stage roles in Hamlet and Chekhov’s Three Sisters. She would later appear in such films as The Girl on a Motorcycle, Marie Antoinette and The Girl from Nagasaki, and the TV series Absolutely Fabulous, in which she was cast as – and did not flinch from playing – God.
