From Godard to Coppola, Van Sant to Anger, Marianne Faithfull was a dazzling magnet for film-makers

The Guardian

30-01-2025

On the screen and also in life, Marianne Faithfull experienced something similar to her contemporary Anita Pallenberg – the condescension of being treated like an icon or a muse. Maybe her very real success in music ruled her out of a serious acting career in the eyes of some, but Faithfull for a while occupied the epicentre of the late-60s pop culture zeitgeist, for an intense flashbulb moment she found herself in the overlapping worlds of music, movies and the explodingly important world of celebrity itself.
The famous photograph of her in 1967 on a couch between Alain Delon and Mick Jagger absolutely captures her magnetism: Delon is entranced by her, Jagger (her boyfriend) is jealous, looking grumpily down: she and Delon were starring together in The Girl on a Motorcycle by the British cinematographer and director Jack Cardiff in which she was the super-sexy rock chick in a leather body suit whose zipper Delon would lasciviously pull down with his teeth.
Around the same time, Jean-Luc Godard gave her a prominent cameo in his archly anti-American Made in USA, singing her chart-topping single As Tears Go By in a cafe, a song that mysteriously becomes the soundtrack to the main characters' tensions and discontents. Godard homed in on her brand identity as a muse for the modishly rebellious Britrock invasion of America and the world – but Godard favoured her as a follower of the bad-boy Stones, not the goody-two-shoes Beatles. She had also appeared in the trendspotting comedy I'll Never Forget What's'isname, from director Michael Winner about that most fashionable of figures: an ad man. She was enigmatic goddess Lilith in Kenneth Anger's experimental Lucifer Rising.
These were not films that made great demands on Faithfull's acting skills, although she certainly had them, as could be seen in Tony Richardson's filmed version of his stage production of Hamlet, in which Faithfull was a poignantly frail Ophelia opposite Nicol Williamson's prince and Anthony Hopkins' king – singing beautifully.
But perhaps it was her destiny in later years (like Pallenberg) to get small parts, some in productions where her presence facilitated financial backing. She was briefly in a 1974 mystery horror called Ghost Story, with Vivian MacKerrell, who inspired the figure of Withnail in Withnail and I. She was briefly in the 90s crime drama Shopping and in Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy.
But a lot of the time it was a question of affectionately and respectfully intended iconic cameos, intended at some level to conjure up the authority of that 60s buzz: Gus Van Sant put her in his short Le Marais in 2006 as part of the Paris, Je T'Aime anthology and the same year Sofia Coppola made her the Empress Maria Theresa, mother of Kirsten Dunst's Marie Antoinette in her film of that name.
But she was also prominent (unfortunately) in that somewhat bizarre British movie Irina Palm from 2008 in which she plays an older woman who turns to sex work to pay for her grandson's operation, taking advantage of her silky palms – giving hand relief via glory holes in a sex clubs to men who never see her. It was a film that briefly gave rise to a prize called the Irina Palm d'Or for the most entirely unsatisfactory British film.
Perhaps Faithfull is a figure from music and pop culture from the lost swinging age rather than cinema, but without the movies she would not have been so potent.