{"id":23793,"date":"2025-01-30T18:48:40","date_gmt":"2025-01-31T01:48:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/marianne-faithfull-singer-and-pop-icon-dies-at-78\/"},"modified":"2025-01-31T01:48:40","modified_gmt":"2025-01-31T01:48:40","slug":"marianne-faithfull-singer-and-pop-icon-dies-at-78","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/marianne-faithfull-singer-and-pop-icon-dies-at-78\/","title":{"rendered":"Marianne Faithfull, singer and pop icon, dies at 78"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"British
British actress and singer Marianne Faithfull poses during a photo-call for her movie 'Irina Palm' at the 57th International Film Festival Berlin 'Berlinale' in Berlin on Feb. 13, 2007. (Markus Schreiber\/The Associated Press)<\/span>dur-i-syn<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

NEW YORK \u2013 Marianne Faithfull, the British pop star, muse, libertine and old soul who inspired and helped write some of the Rolling Stones\u2019 greatest songs and endured as a torch singer and survivor of the lifestyle she once embodied, has died. She was 78.<\/p>\n

Faithfull passed away Thursday in London, her music promotion company Republic Media said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull,\u201d a company spokesperson said in a statement. \u201cMarianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The blonde, voluptuous Faithfull was a celebrity before turning 17, homeless by her mid-20s and an inspiration to peers and younger artists by her early 30s, when her raw, explicit \u201cBroken English\u201d album brought her the kinds of reviews the Stones had received. Over the following decades, her admirers would include Beck, Billy Corgan, Nick Cave and PJ Harvey, although her history would always be closely tied to the Stones and to the years she dated Mick Jagger.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am so saddened to hear of the death of Marianne Faithfull,\u201d Jagger wrote on Instagram. \u201cShe was so much a part of my life for so long. She was a wonderful friend, a beautiful singer and a great actress.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the first songs written by Jagger and Keith Richards, the melancholy \u201cAs Tears Go By,\u201d was her breakthrough hit when released in 1964 and the start of her close and tormented relationship with the band.<\/p>\n

She and Jagger began seeing each other in 1966 and became one of the most glamorous and notorious couples of \u201cSwinging London,\u201d with Faithfull once declaring that if LSD \u201cwasn\u2019t meant to happen, it wouldn\u2019t have been invented.\u201d Their rejection of conventional values was defined by a widely publicized 1967 drug bust that left Jagger and Richards briefly in jail and Faithfull identified in tabloids as \u201cNaked Girl At Stones Party,\u201d a label she would find humiliating and inescapable.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the hazards of reforming your evil ways is that some people won\u2019t let go of their mind\u2019s eye of you as a wild thing,\u201d she wrote in \u201cMemories, Dreams and Reflections,\u201d a 2007 memoir.<\/p>\n

Jagger and Richards often cited bluesmen and early rock \u2018n rollers as their prime influences, but Faithfull and her close friend Anita Pallenberg, Richards\u2019 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\u2019 songwriting and personas, whether as muses or as collaborators.<\/p>\n

Faithfull helped inspire such Stones songs as the mellow tribute \u201cShe Smiled Sweetly\u201d and the lustful \u201cLet\u2019s Spend the Night Together.\u201d It was Faithful who lent Jagger the Russian novel \u201cThe Master and Margarita\u201d that was the basis for \u201cSympathy for the Devil\u201d and who first recorded and contributed lyrics to the Stones\u2019 dire \u201cSister Morphine,\u201d notably the opening line, \u201cHere I lie in my hospital bed.\u201d Faithfull\u2019s drug use helped shape such jaded takes on the London rock scene as \u201cYou Can\u2019t Always Get What You Want\u201d and \u201cLive with Me,\u201d while her time with Jagger also coincided with one of his most vulnerable love songs, \u201cWild Horses.\u201d<\/p>\n

On her own, the London-born Faithfull specialized at first in genteel ballads, among them \u201cCome Stay With Me,\u201d \u201cSummer Nights\u201d and \u201cThis Little Bird.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

She had become addicted to heroin in the late \u201960s, 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 \u201970s, 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 hospitalized with COVID-19 in 2020.<\/p>\n

She shared everything, uncensored, in her memoirs and in her music, notably \u201cBroken English,\u201d which came out in 1979 and featured her seething \u201cWhy\u2019d Ya Do It\u201d and conflicted \u201cGuilt,\u201d in which she chants \u201cI feel guilt, I feel guilt, though I know I\u2019ve done no wrong.\u201d Other albums included \u201cDangerous Acquaintances,\u201d \u201cStrange Weather,\u201d the live \u201cBlazing Away\u201d and, most recently, \u201cShe Walks in Beauty.\u201d Though Faithfull was defined by the 1960s, her sensibility often reached back to the prerock world of German cabaret, and she covered numerous songs by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, including \u201cBallad of the Soldier\u2019s Wife\u201d and the \u201csung\u201d ballet \u201cThe Seven Deadly Sins.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her interests extended to theater, film and television. Faithfull began acting in the 1960s, including an appearance in Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s \u201cMade In U.S.A.\u201d and stage roles in \u201cHamlet\u201d and Chekhov\u2019s \u201cThree Sisters.\u201d She would later appear in such films as \u201cThe Girl on a Motorcycle,\u201d \u201cMarie Antoinette\u201d and \u201cThe Girl from Nagasaki,\u201d and the TV series \u201cAbsolutely Fabulous,\u201d in which she was cast as \u2013 and did not flinch from playing \u2013 God.<\/p>\n

Faithful was married three times, and in recent years dated her manager, Francois Ravard. Jagger was her most famous lover, but other men in her life included Richards (\u201cso great and memorable,\u201d she would say of their one-night stand), David Bowie and the early rock star Gene Pitney. Among the rejected: Bob Dylan, who had been so taken that he was writing a song about her, until Faithfull, pregnant with her son at the time, turned him down.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout warning, he turned into Rumpelstiltskin,\u201d she wrote in \u201cFaithfull,\u201d published in 1994. \u201cHe went over to the typewriter, took a sheaf of papers and began ripping them up into smaller and smaller pieces, after which he let them fall into the wastepaper basket.\u201d<\/p>\n

Faithfull\u2019s heritage was one of intrigue, decadence and fallen empires. Her father was a British intelligence officer during World War II who helped saved her mother from the Nazis in Vienna. Faithfull\u2019s more distant ancestors included various Austro-Hungarian aristocrats and Count Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a 19th century Austrian whose last name and scandalous novel \u201cVenus in Furs\u201d helped create the term \u201cmasochism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Faithfull\u2019s parents separated when she was 6 and her childhood would include time in a convent and in what she would call a \u201cnutty\u201d sex-obsessed commune. By her teens, she was reading Simone de Beauvoir, listening to Odetta and Joan Baez and singing in folk clubs. Through the London art scene, she met Dunbar, who introduced her to Paul McCartney and other celebrities. Dunbar also co-founded the Indica Gallery, where John Lennon would say he met Yoko Ono.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe threads of a dozen little scenes were invisibly twining together,\u201d she wrote in her memoir. \u201cAll these people \u2013 gallery owners, photographers, pop stars, aristocrats and assorted talented layabouts more or less invented the scene in London, so I guess I was present at the creation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her future was set in March 1964, when she attended a recording party for one of London\u2019s hot young bands, the Rolling Stones. Scorning the idea that she and Jagger immediately fell for each other, she would regard the Stones as \u201cyobby schoolboys\u201d and witnessed Jagger fighting with his then-girlfriend, the model Chrissie Shrimpton, so in tears that her false eyelashes were peeling off.<\/p>\n

But she was deeply impressed by one man, Stones manager Andrew \u201cLoog\u201d Oldham, who looked \u201cpowerful and dangerous and very sure of himself.\u201d A week later, Oldham sent her a telegram, asking her to come to London\u2019s Olympic Studios. With Jagger and Richards looking on, Oldham played her a demo of a \u201cvery primitive\u201d song, \u201cAs Tears Go By,\u201d which Faithfull needed just two takes to complete.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of 20 to have written,\u201d Faithfull wrote in her 1994 memoir. \u201cA song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life. The uncanny thing is that Mick should have written those words so long before everything happened. It\u2019s almost as is if our whole relationship was prefigured in that song.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brian Melley contributed from London.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Mick
Mick Jagger, lead singer of the Rolling Stones pop-group, and actress Marianne Faithfull on May 29, 1969, after police arrested them at a house in Chelsea, London. (Peter Kemp\/The Associated Press)<\/span>dur-i-syn<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"British
British singer and actress Marianne Faithfull performs on the Miles Davis Hall stage at the 43rd Montreux Jazz Festival, in Montreux, Switzerland, on July 13, 2009. (Jean-Christophe Bott\/Keystone )<\/span>dur-i-syn<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Mick
Mick Jagger, lead singer of The Rolling Stones, and singer Marianne Faithfull appear at Marlborough St. Court for possession of marijuana, in London on June 23, 1969. (Eddie Worth\/The Associated Press)<\/span>dur-i-syn<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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