Marianne Faithfull, unambiguous icon of British pop, dies aged 78 | Music

Marianne Faithfull, whose career by six decade marked her as one of Britain’s most versatile and characterful singer-songwriters, has died aged 78.

A spokesperson said: “It is with deep sadness that we advertise the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull.

“Marianne died peacefully in London today in the company of her loving family. She will be missed a lot. “

With a discography that spans classic 60s pop models for the prowling synth pop of broken English and on collaboration with Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Lou Reed and more, became a faithful idol of fans and fellow musicians and movies.

He was born in 1946 in London and originated from the Austrian nobility on his mother’s side-healing’s great-great Leopold von Sacher-Masoch wrote the erotic novel Venus in the fur-but grew up in relatively ordinary surroundings in a terraced house in reading.

After leaving for London in her teens, she met Rolling Stones Manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who asked Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to write her debut single from 1964 when tears pass by, which hit the British Top 10. She had three Other top 10 singles in 1965, all of which also reached the top 40 in the US.

Faithful also began to act at the time and appeared on stage in the productions of Chekhov’s three sisters along with Glenda Jackson and Hamlet, where she played Ophelia with Anjelica Huston as her understudy and performs every night’s climatic “madness” scene, she later revealed, she later revealed, High on heroin.

On screen, she traded with Orson Welles, Oliver Reed, Alain Delon and Anna Karina and played herself in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 film made in the United States.

However, her fame as an icon for “Swinging London” was replaced by the notoriousness that came from her relationship with the Rolling Stones. She had married the artist John Dunbar in 1965 and had a son, Nicholas, but soon left downbar to Mick Jagger, whom she had a four -year relationship.

She was often described as a muse of the band: She once told Jagger “Wild Horses couldn’t pull me away”, which became the choir line for wild horses, and her drug match also proved inspiring to the songs dear doctor and you can always get it , you want. She said, “I know they used me as a mouse for the hard drug songs. I knew I was used, but it was for a worthy case. “

She co-wrote her song sister Morphine, recorded with Jagger, Richards and Ry Coods, and later recorded by The Rolling Stones for their album Sticky Fingers, but her writing credit was turned off until she won a long-standing legal battle.

Her addiction to cocaine and heroin was worsened and her reputation was damaged by being discovered naked, wrapped in a fur blanket after a person as an innocent collection “of pure household”). “It ruined me,” she said later. “Being a male drug addict and acting like it is always to improve and glamorize. A woman in this situation becomes a slut and a bad mother. “

In 1970, Faithfull lost custody of her son, split with Jagger and became homeless and lived on Soho’s streets in London as she tried to end heroin. “I had lived in a very false kind of world in the 60s,” she said in 2016. “Suddenly when I lived on the streets … I realized that people were really good. The Chinese restaurant let me wash my clothes there. The man who had the tea parlor gave me cups of tea. “She slowly turned her life around and ended an almost decade long spell away from music with the land album Dreamin ‘My Dreams in 1976.

She cemented her comeback with one of her most acclaimed albums, 1979’s Grammy-nominated broken English, embraced Synthpop and exposed with an affecting raw, elaborated voice. She stopped drugs for good in 1985 and regularly released music throughout the rest of her career. Her partners over the years included Nick Cave, Damon Albarn, Emmylou Harris, Beck and Metallica. She released 21 studio albums.

Faithful married and divorced two more times with Ben Brierly from the Punk Band Vibrators and actor Giorgio della Terza. “I’ve had a wonderful life with all my lovers and men,” she said in 2011, except Della Terza, “He was American and he was a nightmare.”

There were also other functioning roles, especially playing God in two episodes of sitcom absolutely fabulous; The devil in a 2004 production of Black Rider, a musical of Tom Waits and William Burroughs; and Empress Maria Theresa in Sofia Coppola’s movie Marie Antoinette.

In her later years, she lived in Paris and responded to the terrorist attack in 2015 at the city’s Bataclan concert, where 90 people were killed, with a song called they came at night written on the day of the attacks.

Faithful had several health problems. In 2007, she announced that she had liver disease hepatitis C after being diagnosed 12 years earlier. She had a successful surgery following a breast cancer diagnosis in 2006 and weathered several common disorders in her later years, including arthritis. In the early 1970s, she also suffered from anorexia during her heroin addiction. In 2020, she contracted Covid-19 and was hospitalized for 22 days.

She is survived by her son, Nicholas Dunbar.