Marianne Faithfull – Singer, Actress.
Marianne Faithfull, who has died aged 78, was a mercurial singer, who transcended her status as a 1960s swinging London icon and weathered several personal storms to become an elder stateswoman of a very English kind of bohemianism. She became a pop face after scoring a hit with a jaunty rendition of As Tears Go By (1964), composed by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, who would later put out their own version of the song.
Faithfull released five albums between 1965 and 1967, living a high profile lifestyle exacerbated in part by her relationship with Jagger. As the peace and love hedonism of the 1960s gave way to something darker at the end of the decade, Faithfull dropped out of view. Following several years of homelessness and heroin addiction, she returned to music with a vengeance with Broken English (1979).
With Faithfull’s by now far huskier voice already heard on her country album, Dreamin’ My Dreams (1976), Broken English saw her showcase a set of songs that took her beyond her past musical life on an album driven by a moody modern pulse. While the title track was inspired by Ulrike Meinhof of German terrorist cell the Red Army Faction, a stark cover of John Lennon’s Working Class Hero reinvented the former Beatle’s already scabrous lyrics as something even more pointed.
A version of Shel Silverstein’s The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, a song about a suburban houesewife’s mental breakdown and first recorded by Dr Hook, was released as a single. While it only reached the fag end of the charts, Faithfull’s version later appeared on several film soundtracks, including Thelma & Louise (1991).
Broken English closed with the reggae tinged invective of Why’d Ya Do It?, a barbed and explicit response to a lover’s betrayal penned by poet Heathcote Williams. For those who only knew Faithfull from the cut-glass baroque of As Tears Go By, this must have come as a shock. The record’s downbeat tone nevertheless chimed with the times, marking the beginning of Faithfull’s creative rehabilitation. Later named by the NME as of the 500 greatest albums of all time, Broken English remains a totemic artistic statement. Faithfull herself called it her masterpiece.
In the forty-five years that followed, Faithfull released numerous albums, collaborated with a younger generation of artists, and re-recorded old songs with a lived-in vigour that infused them with fresh life. She acted on stage and in films, recorded spoken word albums, and proved herself a captivating performer to the end.
Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull was born in Hampstead, London, to Robert Faithfull and Eva von Sacher-Masoch. Her father was a British army major, while her Budapest born mother had aristocratic roots in the Habsburg dynasty. Her parents divorced when she was six, and she and her mother moved to Reading, where she was given a bursary for St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Convent School. Faithfull joined the local Progress Theatre’s student group, and also spent time at the Braziers Park commune in Oxfordshire, in which her father was involved.
Faithfull had already been singing in coffee bars when she attended a Rolling Stones launch party with her then boyfriend John Dunbar. Faithfull was a key member of the Stones’ inner circle, and became tabloid fodder after being found wrapped in a fur rug during a police drugs raid on Keith Richards’ country estate.
Her creative influences on the band included introducing Jagger to Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, The Master and Margarita, which partly inspired Beggars Banquet era masterpiece, Sympathy for the Devil (1968). Subsequent Stones songs, You Can’t Always Get What You Want (1969) and Wild Horses (1971), are said to have been inspired by her.
But Faithfull was no mere muse. She co-wrote Sister Morphine (1969), originally credited only to Jagger and Richards, but which became one of her key songs. She re-recorded it during the Broken English sessions.
As an actress, on stage, Faithfull played Irina in Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Florence Nightingale in Edward Bond’s play, Early Morning, both at the Royal Court. On film, Faithfull acted opposite Alain Delon in The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968), and played Ophelia in Tony Richardson’s film of his production of Hamlet (1969). On TV, she starred with Britt Ekland in a production of Strindberg’s The Stronger (1971).
While living on the streets, she recorded material that eventually appeared on Rich Kid Blues (1985). An appearance singing Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife on the Hal Willner produced Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill (1985) saw a full collaboration on Strange Weather (1987).
The Seven Deadly Sins (1998) saw Faithfull record Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s seven scene ‘sung ballet’, which she had previously performed in New York. The record contained other Brecht/Weill songs, including material from The Threepenny Opera, in which Faithfull had played Pirate Jenny in Dublin.
Other collaborations include Kissin Time (2002), which featured material co-written with the likes of Jarvis Cocker and Blur. Before the Poison (2005) saw her work with PJ Harvey and Nick Cave. She covered Dusty Springfield and The Shangri-Las alongside new material on Horses and High Heels (2011), appeared with guitarist Bill Frisell at 2013’s Yoko Ono curated Meltdown festival, and released a brand new set of songs on Give My Love to London (2014). In 2018, she collaborated with Cave, fellow Bad Seed Warren Ellis, Ed Harcourt and Mark Lanegan on Negative Capability.
By this time, Faithfull’s significance as an artist had been confirmed in 2011 when she was awarded the Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France.
Faithfull wrote three memoirs; Faithfull: An Autobiography (1994), Memories, Dreams and Reflections (2007) and Marianne Faithfull: A Life on Record (2014). These focused on much more than her musical career and three marriages, to Dunbar (1965-1966), Vibrators guitarist Ben Brierly (1979-1986), with whom she had lived in a Chelsea squat, and Giorgio Della Terza (1998-1991). They also documented her health battles with cancer, hepatitis and several injuries that prevented her from performing. In 2020, she was hospitalised after testing positive with COVID-19.
On what turned out to be her final album, She Walks in Beauty (2021), Faithfull spoke the works of the Romantic poets set to backings by Ellis, with Cave and Brian Eno also contributing. With much of the record recorded in lockdown, the result is the suitably poetic culmination of a body of work spanning more than half a century. As Faithfull matured into a torch song diva, renaissance woman and artistic force to be reckoned with, wisdom and experience were channelled into every note she sang.
She is survived by her son, Nicholas Dunbar, to her first husband, John Dunbar.
The Herald, February 1st 2025
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