Born: December 29th, 1946
Died: January 30th, 2025
Marianne Faithfull, who has died aged 78, was one of the most photographed and talked-about female singers of the 1960s. But to her enduring frustration, her musical talents were eclipsed by her reputation as the pre-eminent It girl of swinging London and her four-year relationship with Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger. “I got out very quickly,” she would say of her Jagger years. “Much as I love The Rolling Stones, they’re not my life.”
With her trendy haircut and movie star looks, her image was of a Carnaby Street femme fatale. But her music could not have been further removed from that glitzy persona. Faithfull’s breathy singing voice brimmed with melancholy, and if early songs such As Tears Go By were disposable pop, in the 1970s, she matured into a thoughtful songwriter who looked back on her gilded past and saw only pain and loss.
This was more than just poetic licence. In 1967, her fame turned to notoriety when the police raided the home of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and found the Stones and hangers-on in a state of drugged debauchery. Faithfull was discovered naked, wrapped in a rug, and the infamy would haunt her for years. “It destroyed me,” she would say. “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 split from Jagger in 1970 upon discovering he was having an affair with Richards’s lover, Anita Pallenberg. After a suicide attempt, and having become addicted to heroin, she also lost custody of her son Nicholas to her ex-husband, art dealer John Dunbar. “Suddenly, when I was living on the streets ... I realised that human beings were really good. The Chinese restaurant let me wash my clothes there. The man who had the tea stall gave me cups of tea.”
Music would prove her salvation. In 1976, while still a drug user, she released the mournful ballad Dreamin’ My Dreams. Ignored in the UK, in Ireland it became a huge hit after being championed by a young Pat Kenny, whom she would acknowledge in her 1994 autobiography. Encouraged by that song’s success, in 1979 she recorded Broken English – the LP widely regarded as her masterpiece.
“Dreamin’ My Dreams was released in Britain to a resounding silence. And then out of the blue a deejay in Ireland by the name of Patrick Kenny started to play it on his show and it went to number one in the Irish charts for seven weeks – the Irish love a waltz,” she wrote. “It was a fluke ... I don’t know whether it’s the church in Ireland or the drinking, but these people do know how to forgive.”
She felt she needed forgiveness after years of addiction. She also believed that Ireland was the one place that would look past her faded glamour and her notoriety and see her for who she was: a broken, confused mother who wanted to do right by the world – and the world to do right by her.
Faithfull had visited Ireland on and off since the 1960s, initially with Jagger. In 1969, months before she and Jagger split, the couple were visiting Glin Castle in Limerick when they were introduced to Anglo-Irish peer Paddy Rossmore – who would later become her fiance (Faithfull would end the relationship in 1979). “He was so Anglo-Irish: long legs that curl up in that English aristocratic way, a bit like an old lady. In short, the sort of man my mother always wanted me to marry,” she recalled of Rossmore. “Flirtation becomes infatuation.”
The singer was born Marian Evelyn Faithfull in December 1946. Her father, Robert Glynn Faithfull, was a British army officer and MI6 agent with a bohemian background to rival any 1960s rocker. His father was a pioneering sexologist, while Robert had helped establish an upmarket commune in Oxfordshire, which Marianne would describe as a “mixture of high utopian thoughts and randy sex”. Her mother, Eva Hermine von Sacher-Masoch, was born in Budapest to Austria-Hungarian nobility: her great-uncle, Baron von Sacher-Masoch, was the author of the pornographic novel Venus In Furs and the creator of the term “masochism”.
The marriage was stormy, and Faithfull’s parents separated when she was six. She and her mother moved to a terraced house in Reading, where Faithfull was educated at the local Catholic school. Her life changed when she met Jagger at a party in 1964. She was only vaguely aware of The Rolling Stones – then just another up-and-coming blues band in London. But their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, thought she looked like an “angel” he could market as a pop star. A few months later, she had her first smash with As Tears Go By – a Rolling Stones original that Jagger and Richards had dismissed as a “terrible piece of tripe”. The public disagreed, and Faithfull’s’ recording became a top-ten hit. A pop icon was born.
If Faithfull’s relationship with the charts was a brief flirtation, her love affair with Ireland was more enduring. She lived for many years at the famous 18th-century Shell Cottage on Carton House near Maynooth – the interior of which is lined with seashells. She later moved to Dublin and Co Waterford before relocating to Paris, where she endured a difficult lockdown, coming close to death after contracting Covid.
She never stopped writing and recording. In 2021, released her final album, She Walks In Beauty – inspired by her love of the British romantic poets. In an interview with Hot Press that year, she was philosophical about her life and continuing association with the Stones. “I haven’t seen Mick for years. I did see him once or twice in Ireland and we just talked non-stop, as if there was no one else in the room. It was at a dinner party, so in a funny way, we’re still kind of close. But no, I don’t go out and I’m not in his world any more.”
She was married and divorced three times, to John Dunbar (1965-66), musician Ben Brierly, a musician (1979-1986), and writer and actor Giorgio Della Terza (1988-1991). She is survived by her son, Nicholas.
