Marianne Faithfull: death of a troubled icon

New European

31-01-2025

Marianne Faithfull, who has died aged 78, was one of many women in the history of the arts who was branded a 'muse' and chronically underestimated as a consequence. Inspiring the Rolling Stones' You Can't Always Get What You Want (1969) and Wild Horses (1970), both released towards the end of her high-profile relationship with Mick Jagger, as well as being the woman responsible for putting a copy of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita in his hands, sparking the idea for Sympathy for the Devil (1968), was always going to loom large in her mythology. But Faithfull's six-decade career was one of bold creativity and admirable personal honesty.
Faithfull's family background could only have encouraged her unconventionality. The family boasted glamorous European roots – Faithfull's great-great-uncle wrote the erotic novel Venus in Furs , her grandfather was Austro-Hungarian nobleman Artur Wolfgang, Ritter von Sacher-Masoch, and her mother, Eva, had been a dancer in Weimer-era Berlin. Yet Faithfull grew up in the staid surroundings of a terraced house in Reading after her parents divorced (her father had been a British intelligence officer during the war, later becoming a professor of Italian literature).
While Eva, who styled herself as a baroness, told her daughter 'wonderful stories about castles and parties and balls', as Faithfull put it, there was a dark side to her family inheritance, rooted in the traumas of the twentieth-century. Both Eva and her mother Flora had been raped when the Red Army marched into the city in 1945. Misandry was a large part of the atmosphere of Faithfull's childhood, and her own attitude to men was always complex.
Faithfull was still a teenager when she came into the orbit of the Rolling Stones and all the dangerous masculinity they represented. 'Discovered' by the Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham (his description of her as 'an angel with big tits' summed up the lot of women in the music industry at the time), Faithfull was given a debut single, As Tears Go By, that was written by Jagger and Keith Richards.
A haunting pop ditty with a mournfulness that echoed chanson française , As Tears Go By was proof that, even though her material was less serious, she was the British pop starlet who most convincingly matched the vocal gravitas of the likes of Françoise Hardy. The single made it to number nine in the charts in September 1964 and three Top 10 singles followed over the next ten months.
But the image of the fresh-faced convent school girl turned chanteuse was fleeting. Married and a mother at just 18, Faithfull nevertheless soon became firmly associated with rebellion. In Michael Winner's I'll Never Forget What's 'Is Name (1967) she uttered a partially obscured f-word – a first for mainstream cinema – and she had by that time begun her relationship with Jagger. Moving in with Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg, who were locked in a violent, drug-fuelled relationship, marked the beginning of her own descent into heroin and cocaine addiction.
A 1967 drug raid of Keith Richards' house, where she was discovered wearing only a fur rug, cemented Faithfull's reputation for unconventional living. She later said 'It destroyed me. 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.'
Indeed, Faithfull's complete disregard for social convention was remarkable given the huge gender inequality of the era. The 1960s may have been swinging, but they were also deeply sexist, and at the time of Faithfull's debut the criminalisation of marital rape, the availability of the pill to unmarried women, and the passing of the Abortion Act lay in the future (Faithfull herself had had an illegal abortion in 1965).
Faithfull symbolised another way of being for women – a symbolism that was writ large when she appeared as a married woman in black leather and with Alain Delon as a lover in Jack Cardiff's The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968) (a film that was not without its problematic aspects) – and her struggle with addiction never stopped her creativity, often even fuelling it.
Her 1967 appearance at the Royal Court in Chekhov's Three Sisters with a cast that included Glenda Jackson was followed two years later by a starring role as Ophelia on the same stage, where her portrayal of the tragic character's madness was aided by her being high. Sister Morphine, which she co-wrote with Richards and Jagger, and released as a B side in 1969, was a devastating portrait of drug addiction that was a stand-out moment of her career.
But this all came at huge personal cost. By the time the Stones re-recorded Sister Morphine for their Sticky Fingers in 1971, Faithfull had lost custody of her son and was homeless, and she was erased even from the history of that most personal song by receiving no writing credit on the LP. It was a long road back to personal and professional rebirth, but when it came, it was a dramatic resurgence. Her 1979 album Broken English arrived at the moment of musical history between punk and synthpop and effortlessly melded genres into something that captured the zeitgeist. The album would be nominated for a Grammy.
Faithfull's discovery by later generations brought new projects and new collaborators. Her 2002 album Kissin' Time found her working with Billy Corgan, Beck, Pulp and Blur, and she followed that with Before the Poison (2004), which was as poetic and dark as the heavy involvement of both PJ Harvey and Nick Cave might suggest.
Her final works, made in her adoptive home of Paris, were a pair of albums made with the Bad Seeds' Warren Ellis – the hugely personal Negative Capability (2018), and She Walks in Beauty (2021), her twenty-first studio album which set the poetry of the British Romantics to music, and also featured contributions by Cave and Brian Eno. She had by then rekindled her relationship with her son and her three grandchildren, and she died in London surrounded by her family.
'My main priority in my head was always my work, but then, of course, the men came…', Faithfull said in 2018. 'It wasn't really what I wanted, but I was too pretty to be left alone.'
Repeatedly written off and weighed down by the misogynistic constraints of the times she lived in, it was against the odds that Faithfull proved her artistry across a career of unique experimental breadth.