Marianne Faithfull has died at the age of 78 in London, the London where she was an icon for six decades of songs and movies haunted by her magnetic, charismatic, powerful, and unique personality.
The singer and actress was everything in British pop culture, from the young girl who started recording songs at 18 in Swinging London that turned her into its symbol, to the completely destroyed icon just a decade later, when after her epic romance with Mick Jagger, she repeatedly pressed the self-destruct button until breaking it, without breaking herself, leading to her modern and surprising resurrection in the late 70s, and her second resurrection in the 80s, and several more until this Thursday when, as she sang in her first song, we sit and watch the tears flow.
"With deep sadness, we announce the death of the singer, songwriter, and actress Marianne Faithfull," a spokesperson for her management company announced on Thursday. "Marianne passed away today in London in the company of her family".
Marianne Faithfull's story is out of this world and begins in 1964 when, at 17 years old and with no experience as a singer or actress, she meets Andrew Oldham, the infamous, unscrupulous manager of the Rolling Stones at a party. It was love at first sight, a hunch, blah blah. He puts her in a studio with a ballad by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, As Tears Go By, and Faithfull becomes a star on the first try.
Marianne Faithfull had noble origins on her mother's side, who was a baroness from Central Europe with a bohemian life, a descendant of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the famous author of Venus in Furs who popularized the concept of masochism, a detail not trivial in this story.
In her early career, she projected a virginal image that she shattered before turning 20: at the end of 1966, she left her husband, with whom she had a one-year-old son, and began a volcanic relationship with Mick Jagger that lasted four years while Swinging London kept spinning like a dervish dance.
Her inclusion in the inner circle of the Rolling Stones during their rise to glory parallel to her amphetamine-fueled lifestyle diminished her musical potential: she transitioned from star to muse, a status that reduced her role to inspiring great songs (Wild Horses, You Can't Always Get What You Want), instead of starring in them.
While cocaine, heroin, and alcohol spread in constant waves through her fabulous body, her film career helped reinforce her image as a blonde-maned human whirlwind. After playing herself in Made in USA by Jean-Luc Godard, she became the first person to say "fuck" in a commercial film. It was in I'll Never Forget What's'isname (1967), followed by The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968) and Hamlet (1969), a film made after the success of a theatrical production in which she played Ophelia.
1969 was the year when the flashy jet plane that was the Rolling Stones' suicide squad crashed, and Marianne Faithfull was one of its first victims. In July, guitarist Brian Jones was found drowned at the bottom of his pool, and in December, the tragedy of Altamont occurred, the massive concert in California where one person was killed and three others died. In February, Faithfull returned to music with a beautiful single with great lyrical beauty and painful references to drug addiction: Sister Morphine. Not only was it a failure, but her record label, frightened, buried it. That same year, she had a miscarriage (she suffered two more throughout her life and chose to have four voluntary abortions), a drug overdose, and saw her turbulent relationship with Jagger come to an end.
Addicted to heroin and consumed by anorexia, the Baroness Sacher-Masoch spent the 70s on the streets, literally for a long period: over two years, she was a vagabond in the London where she had been a queen, in the heart of Soho, where some of her old friends and acquaintances would sometimes find her begging for the next fix.
As if she had imposed a sentence of exactly a decade on herself, at the end of 1979, Marianne Faithfull reappeared with an unexpected and dazzling album, Broken English. Everything that Marianne Faithfull was in the 60s, that beautiful creature on the road to perdition, that was not who she was on that post-punk-influenced album.
She was only a co-author of two of the eight songs on the album, but suddenly, everything she sang sounded like the wild testimony of someone who had chosen degradation and was not only willing to tell it but to tell it (sing it) very well. The angelic voice of the girl with straight hair was now a battered escape valve. Everything that came out of her rusty larynx forced the listener to stop and listen. Marianne Faithfull had transformed into a postmodern Billie Holiday, a femme fatale whose frankness hurt.
She didn't sell millions of records, but what a great rebirth. Did it help her redirect her career and life? It seemed so, but no. The 80s began with a couple of mediocre albums, relapses into addiction, failures in rehabilitation clinics, and a disastrous new marriage (her husband, Howard Tose, committed suicide by jumping from a 14th-floor).
From that turbulent new phase emerged a sensational album of covers, Strange Weather, a rarity in 1987 that allowed her to settle into a tone that accompanied her until her passing, that of the great interpreter beyond time accompanied by a twilight rock close to mature singer-songwriter style and classic arrangements from a century ago, very Central European, like her origins, remember? Wow, this story is truly tremendous.
A story that deserved a good autobiography, and it arrived in '94, the year when Britpop and nostalgia for 60s London exploded: Faithfull: An Autobiography contains shattered hopes, mistakes made, and prophecies fulfilled, a dark and desolate journey through an inexplicable life, which Marianne Faithfull would often explain while laughing with a cigarette between her fingers.
She entered the century wonderfully, with good albums of dense and painful atmosphere in which all savvy musicians wanted to participate by writing or playing. Vagabond Ways (1999) sounded captivating, Kissing Time (2002) was even better, with Blur, Jarvis Cocker, Beck, and many more, and even better than all of them was Before the Poison, the album written for her by PJ Harvey and Nick Cave.
Residing in Paris in recent decades, she overcame cancer, battled hepatitis C that made her life difficult, broke her hip, and survived pneumonia from COVID. Meanwhile, she continued to record easier, more comfortable albums and offered tours at a pace dictated by her fragile health, although she did not always manage to finish them.
She was Marianne Faithfull, ladies and gentlemen, always so charismatic, powerful, and unique.