UK singer and sometime actress Marianne Faithfull, her real name, known probably more for her life on the edge and then coming back from substance abuse and lousy relationships than her music, though it was substantial, has passed away at the age of 78. No cause of death was given though it seemed as if she had been ill for some time.
She was still in her teens, already had a husband and a child (who later became a noted UK economist named Nicholas Dunbar), when she met Mick Jagger and the rest of the Rolling Stones in the mid-sixties. She was his long term girlfriend during the late 1960s, with him through all the hits and misses, through all the drug busts and general debauchery for which the band became even more famous or infamous, depending on your point of view. She had a parallel singing career with considerable success, mostly in the UK. Before the drugs and hard living, including a period of homelessness, took their toll on her physically, she was also known for her somewhat angelic appearance. That was no doubt part of the attraction to her as a singer and person. Her looks seemed incongruent with her hard-living lifestyle.
However, the relationship between Faithfull and Jagger was never going to work out, and, as mentioned above, she spent many years battling substance abuse, finally overcoming it. Her autobiography with writer David Dalton, Faithfull: An Autobiography, I recommend because it is a portrait of somebody who was a born survivor, just like her late friend, Anita Pallenberg, was.
From the report:
One of the first songs written by Jagger and Keith Richards, the melancholy “As Tears Go By,” was her breakthrough hit when released in 1964 and the start of her close and tormented relationship with the band.
She and Jagger began seeing each other in 1966 and became one of the most glamorous and notorious couples of “Swinging London,” with Faithfull once declaring that if LSD “wasn’t meant to happen, it wouldn’t have been invented.” Their rejection of conventional values was defined by a widely publicized 1967 drug bust that left Jagger and Richards briefly in jail and Faithfull identified in tabloids as “Naked Girl At Stones Party,” a label she would find humiliating and inescapable.
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