MARIANNE FAITHFULL

(29 December 1946 – 30 January 2025)

The singer and actress Marianne Faithfull, who has died aged 78, was discovered at a Rolling Stones party in 1964 where their manager Andrew Loog Oldham met her and suggested she record the Stones’ first attempt at songwriting, ‘As Tears Go By’. The song was an instant hit so, at the age of 18, was born a successful singer and later on actress. She also became something of an iconic cultural figure singing and recording with many famous artistes including The Beatles, The Stones, Lou Reed and Ry Cooder and did her own versions of songs by Bob Dylan and Tom Waits while recording her own numbers. She also worked in the theatre and on film in a career that lasted for nearly sixty years. Marianne Faithfull was born in Hampstead, the daughter of Major Robert Faithfull, a British Intelligence Officer and his wife, dancer Eva. Opposing the Nazi regime the family moved from Europe to England and lived in Lancashire.

When her parents divorced, Marianne moved to Reading aged six with her mother. She developed an interest in acting with the Progress Theatre’s student group and began her singing career by performing in coffee bars. After her first hit record, she went on to make further singles. In 1965 she married the artist John Dunbar and had a son, Nicholas. She gradually got to know The Stones, became friends with Brian Jones, his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg and marijuana too. So began a long relationship with Mick Jagger. There were drug busts which for Faithfull meant losing some film parts. Jagger wrote songs influenced by her but the drugs took their toll and Faithfull became a heroin addict and homeless.

Life was hard after she left Jagger – she lost custody of her son and attempted suicide. However, friends got her into rehab and she began to record again. After being arrested for drugs in Norway she finally released her most famous album, Broken English. However, her voice had taken its toll through drink and drugs. Eventually she moved to New York in the 1980s and later to Paris, gradually issuing more songs and she writing her autobiography. In all she made 22 albums.

Faithfull had appeared on stage since 1967 in Three Sisters at the Royal Court, along with Glenda Jackson. For the cinema she played the field by working with international directors. Her first film in 1966 was Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in USA, about a woman who goes from Paris to Atlantic City to solve the death of a former lover. Anna Karina played the woman and Faithfull played herself. She then made some music videos with The Beatles and The Stones. She was Josie in Michael Winner’s I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘is Name with Oliver Reed. The Girl on a Motorcycle had some notoriety attached to Jack Cardiff and his leather-clad stars, Faithfull and Alain Delon. She made many more films and music videos, narrated The Turn of the Screw, played Ophelia opposite Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet and was in one of the segments of Paris, je t’aime, the anthology of shorts about France’s capital city made by an international cast of actors and directors. She played Empress Maria Theresa in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and was the voice of Bene Gesserit in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune in 2021. Her last work for cinema was narrating Wild Summon, Karni & Saul’s animated short on the life of a female salmon in 2023.

After her brief marriage to John Dunbar, she married and divorced Ben Brierly of the Vibrators punk band, and the actor Giorgio Della Terza. She had three miscarriages and four abortions. Her only child was Nicholas from John Dunbar.

MICHAEL DARVELL