Marianne Faithfull

• 1. Introduction

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  Marianne Faithfull spent decades uneasy about the song that first made her famous. Speaking to Jay Cocks of Time magazine, the English singer and actress admitted: "I always childishly thought that was where my problems started, with that damn song." The song was "As Tears Go By." It launched a career that ran through the heart of Swinging London, into a long and painful stretch out of the spotlight, and then into a late second act that critics took seriously. Her path raises several questions. How did a teenager end up inside the circle of the Rolling Stones? What did the following years cost her, and what did she make from that cost? And what became of the voice that first caught the public's attention?

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• 2. A Viennese Inheritance

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  Eva von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso, was the grand style that Faithfull's mother chose for herself in adulthood. Eva was born in Budapest and moved to Vienna in 1918. As a young woman she danced as a ballerina with the Max Reinhardt Company, in productions of works by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Her own father was the writer Artur Wolfgang Ritter von Sacher-Masoch, an Austro-Hungarian nobleman who lived from 1875 to 1953.

  The family had aristocratic roots in the Habsburg dynasty, and Eva's mother was Jewish. The Sacher-Masoch family secretly opposed the Nazi regime in Vienna. A more notorious relative was Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Faithfull's maternal great-great-uncle. His erotic novel Venus in Furs gave the language the word masochism.

  Major Robert Glynn Faithfull met Eva through his intelligence work for the British Army, which brought him into contact with her family. He later became a professor of Italian literature at Bedford College, London University. Their daughter Marianne was born at the old Queen Mary's Maternity House in Hampstead, London. While her father completed a doctorate at Liverpool University, the family lived in Ormskirk, Lancashire. For part of her early life she lived at Braziers Park in Oxfordshire, a commune formed by John Norman Glaister, where her father played an instrumental role.

  When she was six, her parents divorced, and she moved with her mother to Reading, Berkshire. Money was short, and bouts of tuberculosis marred her childhood. She attended St Joseph's Roman Catholic Convent School, where charity subsidised her place and she boarded weekly for a time. Her half-brother Simon Faithfull, an artist 19 years her junior, was born to her father and his second wife, Margaret Elizabeth, known as Kipps. Away from lessons, Marianne belonged to the student group at the Progress Theatre in Reading.

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• 3. Swinging London

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  In early 1964, Faithfull attended a Rolling Stones launch party with the artist John Dunbar. There she met the band's manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who "discovered" her. Until then she had been singing folk songs a cappella in the coffeehouses of Reading, while still at school.

  "As Tears Go By" became her first single. It was written by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Oldham, and it was a chart success. The Rolling Stones recorded their own version a year later, which also did well. More hits followed, including "This Little Bird", "Summer Nights" and "Come and Stay with Me". In 1965 she released her debut album, Marianne Faithfull, alongside a second record, Come My Way. The debut was a huge success, and further albums on Decca Records followed.

  On the 6th of May 1965, she married John Dunbar in Cambridge, with Peter Asher as best man. The couple lived in a flat at 29 Lennox Gardens in Belgravia. On the 10th of November 1965, at the age of 18, she gave birth to their son Nicholas.

  Everything shifted in 1966. She took Nicholas to stay with Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg in London, started smoking marijuana, and became best friends with Pallenberg. That same year she began a much-publicised relationship with Mick Jagger and left her husband to live with him. The couple became a notorious fixture of the hip Swinging London scene. Her voice can even be heard on the Beatles' song "Yellow Submarine".

  At Redlands, Keith Richards's house in West Wittering, Sussex, police carrying out a drug search found her wearing only a fur rug. Twenty-seven years later, in an interview with A.M. Homes for Details, she said the episode had ravaged her personal life: "It destroyed me. To be a male drug addict and to act like that is always enhancing and glamorising. A woman in that situation becomes a slut and a bad mother." She lost three opportunities to appear in films at that time. "I really thought I had blown my career," she said.

  In May 1967, Graham Nash, who found her "unbelievably attractive", wrote and released the hit "Carrie Anne" with the Hollies. The song began as a portrait of Faithfull. In 1968, by then addicted to cocaine, she gave birth to a stillborn daughter, whom she had named Corrina, while returning from Jagger's country house in Ireland. Later that year she stood on a stage for The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus and gave a solo performance of "Something Better".

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• 4. The Stones Songbook

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  Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita was a book Faithfull introduced to Jagger. It partly inspired "Sympathy for the Devil", which appeared on the 1968 album Beggars Banquet.

  Other songs carry her shadow with less certainty. "You Can't Always Get What You Want", from the 1969 album Let It Bleed, was supposedly written and composed about her. "Wild Horses" and "I Got the Blues", both on the 1971 album Sticky Fingers, were allegedly influenced by her too.

  "Sister Morphine" is the one that carries her name in a legal sense. She co-wrote it, but the writing credit became the subject of a protracted legal battle. It ended with Faithfull being listed as co-author. In her autobiography, she explained why Jagger and Richards had first released it under their own names. They wanted to stop her agent from collecting all the royalties and proceeds from the song. She was homeless and addicted to heroin at the time.

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• 5. Wilderness and Voice

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  In 1969, Faithfull travelled to Australia with Jagger while he filmed Ned Kelly. There she attempted suicide by taking 150 sleeping pills. In May 1970 she ended the relationship after starting an affair with the Anglo-Irish nobleman "Paddy" Rossmore. She lost custody of her son that same year, and her career went into a tailspin.

  For two years she lived on the streets of Soho, suffering from heroin addiction and anorexia nervosa. Friends intervened and enrolled her in an NHS heroin-assisted treatment programme, but she could not stabilise her addiction. In 1971 the producer Mike Leander found her on the streets and tried to revive her career by producing part of the album Rich Kid Blues. That record was shelved until 1985. Her public appearances were rare. One came in October 1973, when she sang Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe" with David Bowie.

  In 1975 she released Dreamin' My Dreams, a country-influenced record that reached number one on the Irish Albums Chart. It returned in 1978 under the title Faithless, with some new tracks added. Around that time she squatted in a Chelsea flat without hot water or electricity, with her boyfriend Ben Brierly of the band the Vibrators. She later shared flats in Chelsea and Regent's Park with Henrietta Moraes.

  In the 1960s, critics had noted her distinctive, high-register, melodic singing. The 1970s changed that. Severe laryngitis, smoking and persistent drug abuse left her voice permanently raspy, cracked and lower in pitch. Some critics praised the new sound as "whisky soaked", and it seemed to carry the raw emotion in her music.

  Broken English arrived in 1979 as her seventh studio album. It was critically acclaimed and a commercial success, and it is regarded as her definitive recording. She married Brierly that same year, and the punk explosion left its mark on the record. The title track addressed terrorism in Europe and was dedicated to Ulrike Meinhof. "Why D'Ya Do It?" set aggressive lyrics, adapted from a poem by Heathcote Williams, to punk-reggae rhythms. Barry Reynolds played its opening electric guitar riff, and a tango pulse ran beneath the hard rock surface. In her autobiography, Faithfull called her fluid, rhythmic delivery of the lyric "an early form of rap". The album earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. It also exposed the full toll alcohol and drugs had taken on her voice, which had traded melody for a raucous, deeper sound. In 1979 she was also arrested for marijuana possession in Norway.

  "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" came out as a single in October 1979 and became one of her highest-charting songs. It later featured on the soundtracks of Montenegro, Tarnation and Thelma and Louise, and in the finale of American Horror Story: Hotel in 2016. She sang it herself in a guest appearance on the fourth season of Absolutely Fabulous. In a 2007 interview on ITV's The South Bank Show, she discussed how she interpreted it.

  Not every moment of the comeback went smoothly. Her Saturday Night Live appearance in February 1980 was a disaster. People blamed too many rehearsals, though some suspected that drugs had caused her voice to seize up.

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• 6. Reinvention

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  Dangerous Acquaintances, released in 1981, was followed by Faithfull's move to New York City. That year she also sang on "Misplaced Love", a single by Rupert Hine that charted in Australia. The comeback did not end her struggles. By the mid-1980s she was battling addiction again, and at one point she tripped on a flight of stairs while under the influence and broke her jaw.

  In 1985 she went to the Hazelden Foundation Clinic in Minnesota for rehabilitation and was treated at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. She then lived in a hotel in nearby Cambridge. There she began an affair, while still married to Brierly, with Howard Tose, a man who was both mentally ill and drug dependent. Tose later died by suicide, jumping from a 14th-floor window of the flat they shared. In 1987 she thanked him on the sleeve of Strange Weather, and in 1995 she wrote and sang about his death in "Flaming September".

  Also in 1985, she performed "Ballad of the Soldier's Wife" on Hal Willner's tribute album Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill. Her restrained readings suited that material, and the collaboration shaped several later projects. Willner then produced Strange Weather, her move into jazz and blues. The two had spent numerous weekends listening to hundreds of songs from twentieth-century music. They settled on Bob Dylan's "I'll Keep It with Mine", "Yesterdays" by the Broadway composers Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach, and tunes first made notable by Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith. Tom Waits wrote the title track. It became her most critically lauded album of the decade. She also cut "As Tears Go By" again, in a tighter, more gravelly voice. In a 1987 interview with Rory O'Connor of Vogue, she declared: "forty is the age to sing it, not seventeen."

  In July 1990, Roger Waters assembled an all-star cast to perform The Wall live in Berlin, and Faithfull played Pink's overprotective mother. The early 1990s brought the live album Blazing Away, recorded at St. Ann's Cathedral in Brooklyn. Its 13 selections included "Sister Morphine" and a cover of Edith Piaf's "Les Prisons du Roy". Alanna Nash of Stereo Review described her voice as "a cracked and halting rasp".

  A retrospective released by Island Records in 1994 included "Ghost Dance", a song written by Patti Smith. Charlie Watts and Ron Wood backed Faithfull's vocals, and Keith Richards co-produced. A Secret Life followed in 1995, with songs co-written with the composer Angelo Badalamenti. That year she also sang "Love Is Teasin'" with The Chieftains on their album The Long Black Veil. In 1997 she sang on Oxbow's Serenade in Red and contributed interlude vocals to Metallica's "The Memory Remains", appearing in its video. That track reached number 13 in the UK, number 28 in the United States, and number 3 on the US Mainstream Rock chart.

  Twentieth Century Blues, released in 1996, grew from her fascination with the music of Weimar-era Germany. It focused on Weill and Brecht, and also on Noël Coward. In 1998 she recorded The Seven Deadly Sins with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. A cabaret tour with the pianist Paul Trueblood ended with the filming of the DVD Marianne Faithfull Sings Kurt Weill at the Montreal Jazz Festival.

  Vagabond Ways, in 1999, was produced and recorded by Mark Howard. Daniel Lanois, Emmylou Harris, Roger Waters and the writer Frank McGuinness all collaborated. It included "Incarceration of a Flower Child", a song Waters wrote in 1968 as a portrait of Syd Barrett that Pink Floyd never recorded. Kissin Time followed in 2002, with songs written with Blur, Beck, Billy Corgan, Jarvis Cocker, Dave Stewart and the French pop singer Étienne Daho. It held "Song for Nico", a tribute to an artist she admired, and "Sliding Through Life on Charm", an autobiographical song she wrote with Cocker.

  In 2005 she released Before the Poison, mainly a collaboration with PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, with contributions from Damon Albarn and Jon Brion. Rolling Stone and Village Voice gave it mixed reviews. Recording of Easy Come, Easy Go began in New York City on the 6th of December 2007, again with Willner producing. Horses and High Heels reached mainland Europe on the 31st of January 2011 to mixed reviews. Give My Love to London, an album of all-new material, followed in September 2014. Negative Capability came in November 2018, featuring Rob Ellis, Warren Ellis, Nick Cave, Ed Harcourt and Mark Lanegan. Warren Ellis would be back for her next record.

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• 7. Stage and Screen

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  Her first professional theatre appearance came in 1967, when she played Irina in Chekhov's Three Sisters at London's Royal Court Theatre. Glenda Jackson and Avril Elgar co-starred. A year earlier, she had played herself in Jean-Luc Godard's film Made in U.S.A., singing "As Tears Go By" in a cafe.

  I'll Never Forget What's'isname, also from 1967, carries a curious distinction. In it, Faithfull, playing Josie, became the first person to say the f-word in a mainstream studio picture. In 1968 she starred as a black leather-clad motorcyclist in The Girl on a Motorcycle, opposite Alain Delon, and that film made her famous in France. The ground had been prepared by a widely discussed photograph from Paris Match photographer Patrice Habans. It showed her beaming as she talked with Delon, while Jagger sat on her other side. She also appeared in Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising. At the Round House in London in 1969, she played Ophelia in Hamlet, which was later filmed.

  On the London stage, she took the part of a lesbian Florence Nightingale in Edward Bond's Early Morning at the Royal Court. Her other credits included The Collector at St Martin's Theatre, Mad Dog at Hampstead Theatre, and John Osborne's A Patriot for Me at the Palace Theatre. She also played Lizzie Curry in N. Richard Nash's The Rainmaker, which toured the UK. Her 1970s film roles included Sophy Kwykwer in Stephen Weeks's Ghost Story and Helen Rochefort in Assault on Agathon. On television she appeared in The Door of Opportunity in 1970, adapted from a story by W. Somerset Maugham, and in August Strindberg's The Stronger in 1971.

  In 1991 she played Pirate Jenny in The Threepenny Opera at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. She also played both God and the Devil. She appeared as God in two guest spots on Absolutely Fabulous. In 2004 and 2005 she played the Devil in The Black Rider, the musical by William Burroughs and Tom Waits, directed by Robert Wilson, which opened at London's Barbican Theatre.

  Patrice Chereau's Intimacy and C.S. Leigh's Far from China both featured her in 2001. In 2004 she appeared in Jose Hayot's Nord-Plage, and in 2006 she played Empress Maria Theresa in Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.

  Irina Palm, released at the Berlinale film festival in 2007, gave her the central role of Maggie, a 60-year-old widow who becomes a sex worker to pay for medical treatment for her ill grandson. The performance earned her a nomination for the European Film Award for Best Actress.

  In 2008 she toured readings of Shakespeare's sonnets, drawing on the Dark Lady sequence, with the cellist Vincent Segal as her accompanist. That year she also appeared in Nik Sheehan's documentary FLicKeR, about Brion Gysin and the dreamachine. A production of Kurt Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins at Landestheater Linz in Austria ran from October 2012 to January 2013. On the 18th of September 2013, she appeared in the genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are?, which traced her family's roots, especially her mother's side in pre-war Austria.

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• 8. Late Reckonings

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  In March 2007, Faithfull took the touring show Songs of Innocence and Experience around European theatres, with a trio and a semi-acoustic feel. Articles at the time hinted that she hoped to retire. "I'm not prepared to be 70 and absolutely broke," she said, adding that she had no safety net. She still kept a flat on one of the richest Parisian avenues and a house in County Waterford, Ireland.

  Recognition arrived in 2009. On the 5th of March, she received the World Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 2009 Women's World Awards, presented in Vienna. The ceremonies were televised in over 40 countries on the 8th of March, as part of International Women's Day. On the 26th of October 2009, Q magazine named her Icon of the Year. That November she told World Radio Switzerland's Jennifer Davies that being stereotyped as a "mother, or the pure wife" had made a long career hard for a woman. She said it gave her empathy for Amy Winehouse, whom she had recently met. On the 23rd of March 2011, France made her a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of its highest cultural honours. VH1 had ranked her 25th among its 100 Greatest Women of Rock and Roll in 1999. In 2023, Rolling Stone placed her at number 173 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.

  She also wrote about her own life. Faithfull: An Autobiography appeared in 1994, and Memories, Dreams and Reflections followed in 2007. Marianne Faithfull: A Life on Record came in 2014, edited by Faithfull and Francois Ravard, with an introduction by Salman Rushdie.

  Health problems repeatedly interrupted her work. In late 2004 she called off the European leg of a world tour after collapsing on stage in Milan, and she was hospitalised for exhaustion. In September 2006 she cancelled another tour after a breast cancer diagnosis. She had surgery in France the following month and needed no further treatment, because the tumour had been caught very early. In October 2007, she told viewers of the UK television programme This Morning that she had hepatitis C, first diagnosed 12 years earlier. On the 27th of May 2008, a statement posted on her MySpace page said doctors had ordered her to stop all work and rehabilitate for around six months. The statement came through FR Management, run by her boyfriend and manager, Francois Ravard.

  A back injury in California in August 2013 forced her to cancel concerts in the United States and Lebanon. On the 30th of May 2014, she broke her hip in a fall while on holiday on the Greek island of Rhodes. An infection followed, and parts of her 50th anniversary tour were cancelled or postponed so she could have more surgery and rehabilitation. In 2016 she revealed she had emphysema and needed inhaled medication every day. She kept smoking until 2019, and later regretted not quitting sooner.

  On the 4th of April 2020, it was announced that she was in a London hospital with pneumonia after testing positive for COVID-19. She was discharged after three weeks. She first thought the effects on her lungs would stop her from ever singing again, and she continued to suffer memory loss. She worked on her breathing and practised singing as part of her recovery. In May 2021 she released the spoken word album She Walks in Beauty, reciting 19th-century British Romantic poets over arrangements by Warren Ellis, Brian Eno, Nick Cave and Vincent Segal. The same year she began work on Broken English, a biographical documentary by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, which holds her last singing performance. In March 2022 she moved into Denville Hall.

  Faithfull died in London on the 30th of January 2025, at the age of 78. She is buried at St Mary's Church in Aldworth, Berkshire. The documentary premiered at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival. On the 14th of March 2025, the single "Burning Moonlight", which she co-wrote, was released after her death. An EP of the same name followed later in the year for Record Store Day. It includes a new recording of "She Moved Thru' the Fair", a song she had first recorded in 1966.

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