Tag: Pop

Marianne Faithfull, who went from being a fresh-faced, feather-voiced pop star, as well as muse and girlfriend of Mick Jagger, to a homeless heroin addict, only to re-emerge radically altered in her early 30s as a critically acclaimed cabaret performer singing songs of dark honesty, died on Thursday in London. She was 78.

Her death was confirmed by a spokesperson, who did not cite a cause.

The roiling dramas in Ms. Faithfull’s life, along with the starry circles she moved in during the Swinging Sixties and the unvarnished power of her later music, turned her into a nearly mythic figure — a symbol of survival and transformation. It’s a role she at first rued but later came to relish.

“What I’ve been trying to do, and I think I’ve done it rather well, is bring the persona — or what was a false persona in the beginning — and me together,” she told the British newspaper The Independent in 2008.

But the road to get there was long and perilous. It involved a miscarriage, the temporary loss of her only child in a custody battle, a suicide attempt, several stints in rehab and a 1967 drug arrest — also involving the Rolling Stones — whose salacious and sometimes erroneous details generated reams of heated headlines in Britain.

Still, when Ms. Faithfull finally found a bold new path for her music, starting in 1979 with the new-wave-influenced album “Broken English,” she earned the kind of broad respect she had never before enjoyed, inspired by the brutal truth of her material and the scarred gravity of her voice.

“I’ve got the right voice for me,” she told The Independent of her new sound. “It gives an edge to everything.

“I don’t have to act out,” she continued. “I just have to open my mouth and there it is.”

Over the years, Ms. Faithfull maintained a parallel if fitful acting career in theater, television and film. She made her stage debut in 1967 in a London production of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” co-starring Glenda Jackson. That same year she had a major role in “I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname,” in which she earned the distinction of being the first person to utter the “f” word in a major studio film.

The next year she had the glamorous title role in “The Girl on a Motorcycle,” opposite Alain Delon. In 1969, she played the doomed Ophelia in a well-regarded film version of “Hamlet,” starring Nicol Williamson. Her lead role as a conflicted 60-year-old prostitute in the 2007 French film “Irina Palm” earned her a nomination for best actress at the European Film Awards.

In addition to the more than 20 albums she released, Ms. Faithfull contributed lyrics, or inspiration, for some classic Rolling Stones songs. Mr. Jagger based the words to “Sympathy for the Devil” in part on the Russian novel “The Master and Margarita,” by Mikhail Bulgakov, which she had given him. She also uttered the phrase that inspired the key lyrical refrain in “Wild Horses” (“Wild horses couldn’t drag me away”) and co-wrote “Sister Morphine,” which she released as a solo single in 1969, two years before the Stones’ version appeared on the album “Sticky Fingers.” (Though Ms. Faithfull received writer credit on her own recording of the song, she didn’t earn parallel status on the Stones album until 1994, after a long legal battle.)

A Spy and a Baroness

Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull was born in the Hampstead area of London on Dec. 29, 1946, to a family whose rare history presaged her own.

Her father, Robert Glynn Faithfull, had been a British spy during World War II and later a literature professor at the University of London. Inspired by what Ms. Faithfull often described as an eager appetite for the erotic, her father invented a device meant to liberate female sexuality, which he named the “Frigidity Machine.” Her mother, Eva von Sacher-Masoch, was a Viennese baroness, an ex-ballet dancer and a descendant of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of the erotic novel “Venus in Furs,” which spawned the term masochism.

“It was a colorful upbringing,” Ms. Faithfull told Saga magazine in 2007. “And I dare say I have traits from both my parents.”

But her parents’ marriage was over by the time Marianne was 6, and she moved with her mother, who had little money of her own, to a modest house in Reading, west of London. Her education at a Roman Catholic convent school was subsidized by charity.

Instead of going to college, she began venturing into London clubs to explore the exploding underground art and music scene. She also scored the occasional gig singing folk songs in local coffeehouses.

At a 1964 party for the Rolling Stones, she was approached by their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, who was drawn by her beauty. “He asked me, ‘Can you sing?’ And I said, ‘Mm-mm, I can,” she said in a 2005 interview on NPR. “About a week later, I got a telegram from Andrew saying, ‘Be at Olympic Studios at 2 o’clock.’”

There she recorded her first track, “As Tears Go By,” often said to be the first original composition by Mr. Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, which until then had mostly performed blues and R&B covers. The recording, with its wan English-horn hook and wistful lyrics, “was a very strange song for two 21-year-old boys to write and a stranger one for an 18-year-old girl to sing,” Ms. Faithfull told The Daily News of New York in 1987.

Still, the single became a Top 10 hit in Britain in 1964 while also breaking into Billboard’s Top 25 in the United States. In his introduction to a photo-driven book about her, “A Life on Record” (2014), Salman Rushdie described the young Ms. Faithfull, with wry affection, as having “the voice of a slightly zoned-out chorister.”

She racked up three more Top 10 hits in Britain in 1965, “Come and Stay with Me” (No. 4), “This Little Bird” (No. 6) and “Summer Nights” (No. 10).

For her album debut, her label, Decca, issued two simultaneous releases. One, simply titled “Marianne Faithfull,” concentrated on her pop songs, while the other, “Come My Way,” consisted mainly of traditional folk pieces and rose to No. 12 on the British charts, three positions higher than its companion.

At the age of 19, in 1965, Ms. Faithfull married John Dunbar, owner of the hip Indica Gallery, where John Lennon would meet Yoko Ono the next year. Six months after they wed, she gave birth to their son, Nicholas. Not long after, she left her husband to live with Mr. Jagger, and Nicholas was sent to her mother to raise. (The Dunbars didn’t formally divorce until 1970.)

Drugs and the Stones

Ms. Faithfull and Mr. Jagger became one of London’s most glamorous, and photographed, couples; they also became one of its most notorious after the police raided a party in 1967 at Keith Richards’s home, searching for drugs. They found them, along with Ms. Faithfull, with only a fur rug wrapped around her.

Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards were charged and received sentences that were later dismissed. Though Ms. Faithfull was not charged, she fumed about the unequal treatment she received in the press. “It destroyed me,” she told Details magazine in 1993. “To be a male drug addict and to act like that is always enhancing and glamorizing. A woman in that situation becomes a slut and a bad mother.”

Ms. Faithfull tried to have a child with Mr. Jagger in 1968 but suffered a miscarriage. At the end of that year, she appeared on the television special “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus,” performing the song “Something Better” while looking quite the worse.

In 1969, while on a plane with Mr. Jagger to Australia, where he was to star in the western film “Ned Kelly,” a distraught Ms. Faithfull took more than 100 pills of the barbiturate Tuinal, sending her into a coma. “It’s very bad form to try and kill yourself when you’re with Mick Jagger,” she dryly told The Telegraph in 2011.

When she emerged from the coma in an Australian hospital six days later, her first words were reportedly “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away.” But the relationship was over. “I just wanted out of that world,” she told Saga. “It wasn’t that I didn’t love Mick. But I wasn’t cut out for all that.

“It’s a great honor to be a muse,” she added, but “that’s a very hard job.”

For two years, Ms. Faithfull lived on the streets of London, where she slipped into heroin addiction. She also lost custody of her son to Mr. Dunbar. “I wanted to disappear completely,” she told The Telegraph.

A record producer coaxed her into making an album, “Rich Kid Blues,” in 1971, but it was not released until 1985. An admired country-influenced album she recorded in 1975, “Dreamin’ My Dreams,” reached No. 1 in Ireland.

Around that time she became romantically involved with Ben Brierley of the punk band the Vibrators. They married in 1979. She also began recording demos featuring some of the songs that would end up on “Broken English.” The recordings greatly impressed Chris Blackwell of Island Records, and he signed her.

While Ms. Faithfull’s drug and alcohol use had lowered her voice by several octaves and caused it to crack in places, the new sound gave her an unforeseen character and depth, suggesting a hip answer to Lotte Lenya or a punk Marlene Dietrich. The material on “Broken English” followed suit, with literate songs about terrorism and a suicidal housewife, as well as the curse-strewn epic “Why D’Ya Do It?” (with words by the poet Heathcote Williams).

The album not only thrilled critics; it was also her first to make the U.S. charts since 1965. It earned platinum status and a Grammy nomination for best female rock vocal performance.

A Cabaret Artist

Still, Ms. Faithfull’s drug days were not yet behind her. She didn’t clean up until 1985, after which her music took another fascinating turn, revealed on the 1987 album “Strange Weather,” produced by Hal Willner. It repositioned her as an esteemed gothic cabaret artist singing material ranging from show tunes to blues classics to the title track, a new song written by Tom Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan. She also included a fresh version of “As Tears Go By” — a far more consequential one than the original, better suited to the lyrics.

By then, Ms. Faithfull had divorced Mr. Brierley and, in 1988, married a younger man, Giorgio Della Terza. They divorced three years later, after which she began to record prolifically, to critical acclaim. In quick succession, during the mid-1990s, she released a richly orchestrated album produced by Angelo Badalamenti, “A Secret Life”; a spare live collection of mainly Weimar Republic songs, “20th Century Blues”; and a take on Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “The Seven Deadly Sins,” recorded with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Starting with “Kissin Time” in 2002, Ms. Faithfull released a series of albums on which she collaborated with a wide range of respected younger admirers, including Beck, Jarvis Cocker, PJ Harvey and Nick Cave. She continued to tour and record in later years; a well-reviewed 2018 album, “Negative Capability,” included yet another version of “As Tears Go By” and made the British Top 50. Her last album, released in 2021, was “She Walks in Beauty,” a collaboration with the multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis.

In recent years Ms. Faithfull successfully battled breast cancer and hepatitis C, both of which she wrote about in her 2007 memoir, “Memories, Dreams and Reflections” — a more sanguine effort than her first, “Faithfull,” published 13 years earlier — and, later, Covid-19. In 2011, she was named a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government.

She is survived by her son, Nicholas Dunbar, and three grandchildren.

Throughout the many roller-coaster twists of her life, Ms. Faithfull remained committed both to addressing them frankly in interviews and to transforming them into art.

“I don’t know how else to be but raw and honest,” she told British Vogue in 2014. “It may be hard for other people to take. But even if I try to, I can’t stop myself from saying what I think.”

Ash Wu contributed reporting.