English singer and actor Marianne Faithfull has died at the age of 78, BBC reports. “It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull,” her family said in a statement. “Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed.”
Born in Hampstead, London, England on December 29, 1946, Faithfull took up singing and moved to London in her teens. She met Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham at a party in 1964, and he asked Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to write her debut single ‘As Tears Go By’, which became an international hit. She scored several more hits in the mid-60s while also embarking on an acting career, appearing in films such as I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname (1967), The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968), and Hamlet (1969). Her rising popularity coincided with her highly publicized affair with Jagger, and ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ and ‘Wild Horses’ were just two of the Rolling Stones songs she inspired; after coming out of a drug-induced coma in 1969, “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away” was purportedly the first thing Faithfull told Jagger.
After splitting up with Jagger in the early ’70s, Faithfull’s drug struggles worsened, and at one point she lived homeless on the streets of Soho. “I’d been living in a very fake sort of world in the 60s,” she said in a 2016 interview. “Suddenly, when I was living on the streets … I realised that human beings were really good. The Chinese restaurant let me wash my clothes there. The man who had the tea stall gave me cups of tea.”
Faithfull achieved a comeback with her 1979 album Broken English, which leaned into synthpop with her by then raw, weathered voice. It earned a Grammy nomination for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, and Faithfull followed it up with a series of albums, including Dangerous Acquaintances (1981), A Child’s Adventure (1983), and Strange Weather (1987). She published her self-titled autobiography in 1994, but wrote two more books about her life, Memories, Dreams & Reflections (2007) and Marianne Faithfull: A Life on Record (2014).
Faithfull released several albums in the 2000s, beginning with 2002’s Kissin Time, which featured collaborations with Beck, Damon Albarn, Billy Corgan, Jon Brion, Jarvis Cocker, and more. Its follow-up, Before the Poison, included songwriting and production contributions from PJ Harvey, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Brion, and Albarn.
In 2007, Faithfull revealed she had been diagnosed with the liver disease hepatitis C twelve years earlier. After being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006, she underwent successful surgery and faced various joint issues in her later years, including arthritis. While homeless and addicted to heroin, she also suffered from anorexia nervosa. In 2020, she was hospitalized for pneumonia after testing positive for COVID, temporarily losing her ability to sing. Her final album was 2021’s She Walks in Beauty, which accompanied her spoken word with musical arrangements by Warren Ellis, Brian Eno, Nick Cave, and Vincent Segal.