Marianne Faithfull

Marianne Faithfull was born on 29 December 1946 at Queen Mary's Maternity House in Hampstead, London. The family lived for a time in Ormskirk, Lancashire, while her father completed a doctorate at Liverpool University, and she spent part of her early childhood at Braziers Park in Oxfordshire, a commune formed by John Norman Glaister in which her father was closely involved. Her father, Major Robert Glynn Faithfull, was a British intelligence officer and professor of Italian literature at Bedford College, London. Her mother, Eva, was born in Budapest, grew up in Vienna, danced with the Max Reinhardt company and styled herself Eva von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso. Eva was the daughter of the writer Artur Wolfgang Ritter von Sacher-Masoch, and through her Faithfull was a great-great-niece of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose novel Venus in Furs gave the world the word masochism. Her parents divorced when she was six and she moved with her mother to Reading, Berkshire, where they lived in hard circumstances and she suffered bouts of tuberculosis. Her half-brother, the artist Simon Faithfull, was born 19 years after her to her father's second marriage. In 2013 she traced her Austrian roots on the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?

Faithfull was a bursaried pupil at St Joseph's Roman Catholic Convent School in Reading and was for a time a weekly boarder there. She was a member of the student group of Reading's Progress Theatre, and while still at school she sang folk songs unaccompanied in the town's coffee houses.

In early 1964 Faithfull went to a Rolling Stones launch party with John Dunbar and was discovered by Andrew Loog Oldham. Her first single, "As Tears Go By", written by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Oldham, was a UK top 10 hit, and "This Little Bird", "Summer Nights" and "Come and Stay with Me" followed. In 1965 Decca released her debut Marianne Faithfull alongside the folk-based Come My Way. She also built an acting career: Godard's Made in U.S.A. (1966), I'll Never Forget What's'isname (1967), Irina in Three Sisters at the Royal Court (1967), The Girl on a Motorcycle with Alain Delon (1968), which made her famous in France, and Ophelia in Hamlet at the Roundhouse, later filmed (1969). She sang "Something Better" in The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus in 1968.

The early 1970s were lost to addiction, though Dreamin' My Dreams (1975) topped the Irish album chart. Broken English (1979) was a triumphant comeback, with "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" becoming one of her biggest songs and the album earning a Grammy nomination. Dangerous Acquaintances (1981), A Child's Adventure (1983) and Strange Weather (1987), produced by Hal Willner, followed. In 1990 she played Pink's mother in Roger Waters' The Wall in Berlin. The live album Blazing Away, A Secret Life with Angelo Badalamenti, Twentieth Century Blues and The Seven Deadly Sins with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra explored Weimar song and cabaret.

Her later albums drew on a remarkable list of collaborators: Vagabond Ways (1999), Kissin Time (2002) with Blur, Beck, Billy Corgan and Jarvis Cocker, Before the Poison (2005) with PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, Easy Come, Easy Go (2008), Horses and High Heels (2011), Give My Love to London (2014), Negative Capability (2018) and the spoken word She Walks in Beauty (2021) with Warren Ellis, Brian Eno and Nick Cave. Her film work included Intimacy (2001), Marie Antoinette (2006) and Irina Palm (2007), and she played God in Absolutely Fabulous and the Devil in The Black Rider.

Faithfull married the artist and gallerist John Dunbar on 6 May 1965 in Cambridge, with Peter Asher as best man, and their son Nicholas Dunbar was born on 10 November 1965. From 1966 to 1970 she was in a relationship with Mick Jagger. In 1968 she lost a daughter, whom she had named Corrina, in a stillbirth, and in 1969 she attempted suicide in Australia while Jagger was filming Ned Kelly. After the split she lost custody of her son and spent about two years homeless in Soho, addicted to heroin. She married Ben Brierly of the Vibrators in 1979; they divorced in the 1980s. She was married to the actor Giorgio della Terza from 1988 to 1991. Her longtime partner and manager in later life was François Ravard. She had homes in Paris and County Waterford, Ireland, and spoke openly about her relationships with both men and women in the 1960s.

Faithfull was outspoken about the double standards she faced. Reflecting on the 1967 Redlands drug raid, she said the episode destroyed her because a male drug addict was glamorised while a woman in the same situation was branded a bad mother. She later said it had been hard to sustain a long career as a female artist when women were stereotyped as mothers or pure wives, which gave her empathy for Amy Winehouse. In the reader's note to her 1994 autobiography she wrote that she would never apologise and never explain.

Faithfull is remembered as a defining figure of 1960s London and as one of the most striking second acts in popular music. Her changed voice on Broken English, praised as raw and whisky soaked, influenced generations of singers, and artists from Cyndi Lauper to Nick Cave paid tribute to her. She was linked to some of the Rolling Stones' best known songs, including "Sister Morphine", which she co-wrote, and "Wild Horses". VH1 ranked her 25th among the 100 Greatest Women of Rock and Roll in 1999, and Rolling Stone placed her 173rd among the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time in 2023.

Grammy nomination for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance for Broken English. European Film Award nomination for Best Actress for Irina Palm (2007). World Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Women's World Awards in Vienna (5 March 2009). Q magazine Icon of the Year (26 October 2009). Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France (23 March 2011).

Faithfull wrote Faithfull: An Autobiography (1994), Memories, Dreams and Reflections (2007) and Marianne Faithfull: A Life on Record (2014), with an introduction by Salman Rushdie. The 1999 documentary Dreaming My Dreams covered her childhood and career, and the film Broken English by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, featuring her last singing performance, premiered at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival in 2025. "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" has been used in Thelma and Louise and American Horror Story: Hotel.

In February 1967 police raiding Keith Richards' house, Redlands in West Wittering, found Faithfull wearing only a fur rug, and the tabloid myths that grew from the raid followed her for decades. She denied the most notorious of them in a 1996 interview with The Independent. The songwriting credit for "Sister Morphine" was the subject of a long dispute that ended with her being listed as a co-author. In 1979 she was arrested for marijuana possession in Norway.

After years of ill health, including breast cancer in 2006, hepatitis C, emphysema, a broken hip in 2014 and COVID-19 with pneumonia in 2020, Faithfull moved into Denville Hall in March 2022. She died peacefully in London on Thursday 30 January 2025, aged 78. Her spokesperson said: "It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull. Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed." No cause of death was made public. Tributes came from Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and many others. She is buried at St Mary's Church, Aldworth, Berkshire. She was survived by her son, Nicholas Dunbar.