Marianne Faithfull Dies at 78: 'She Will Be Dearly Missed'

Marianne Faithfull, the British singer and actress who was widely known as the crown princess of Swinging Sixties London, has died.

"It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull," a statement released by her spokesperson and obtained by PEOPLE on Thursday, Jan. 30 said.

"Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed."

A cause of death was not immediately available.

Faithfull, whose music career was often discussed in the same breath as her romantic liaisons with stars like Mick Jagger and her struggles with substance abuse, had contracted COVID-19 in April 2020, and dealt with long-term side effects such as memory and lung problems as well as fatigue.

The "As Tears Go By" singer was born in Hampstead, London in December 1946 to Eva von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso, and Major Glynn Faithfull, a British Intelligence officer, who separated when she was 6.

Faithfull was famously discovered at a London party in 1964 by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who launched her career with the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards-penned song "As Tears Go By."

Though the song was a hit, Faithfull was never among its biggest fans.

"I was never that crazy about 'As Tears Go By,'" she wrote in her 1994 autobiography Faithfull. "[It] was a marketable portrait of me and as such is an extremely ingenious creation, a commercial fantasy that pushes all the right buttons."

As the '60s continued, so too did Faithfull's career, which expanded to the silver screen thanks to acting roles in films like 1967's Girl on a Motorcycle and stage productions like Three Sisters and Hamlet.

Related: Marianne Faithfull Claims Her Ex Killed Jim Morrison

Though she'd married first husband John Dunbar as an 18-year-old in 1965, and welcomed son Nicholas that same year, she left him shortly after to pursue a relationship with Jagger, which catapulted the pair to "It Couple" status. Faithfull is long believed to have been the inspiration behind Stones classics like "You Can't Always Get What You Want" and "Wild Horses."

"You know, being a woman in rock 'n' roll didn't show me kindness," Faithfull told British Vogue in April 2021. "Though that's not to say that Mick was unkind – he wasn't. Mick and Keith [Richards] and Charlie [Watts] were really kind – but a lot of people weren't."

Related: Marianne Faithfull Says Medics 'Saved My Life' After 22-Day Hospital Treatment for Coronavirus

By the time she and Jagger split in 1970 ("He wasn't the great love of my life. We were just two kids living on too many different levels," she told PEOPLE in 1980) her career was splintering as well thanks to excessive drug use, sporadic homelessness and a battle with anorexia nervosa. Stories such as the six days she spent in a coma in 1969 after overdosing on sleeping pills soon came to overshadow her career.

"[I was] dependent on every possible neurotic thing – heroin, coke, pills, alcohol, sex and money," she wrote in Faithfull, calling herself a "garden-variety drug addict." "The first year I was in treatment I was dying to uncover a serious psychosis that I could pin it all on, but nothing like that ever showed up. My headlong descent had much more to do with a willful and heedless pursuit of hedonism."

Though she attempted several comebacks in the '70s, her most successful was the critically acclaimed 1979 album Broken English, a showcase for the ways in which her excessive drug use and laryngitis had transformed her lilting, melodic voice into something more gritty and raspy.

By the '80s, she'd developed a blusier and more jazzy sound, which she put on display in 1987's Strange Weather. The album featured the first of her two "As Tears Go By" re-recordings; she gave the track a third go in 2018 on her album Negative Capability.

During this time, she also married twice: first to the Vibrators rocker Ben Brierly in 1979, and then to Giorgio della Terza, from whom she split in 1991 after three years of marriage. She later dated her manager, French record producer François Ravard, for 15 years before they parted ways in 2009, according to the Guardian.

"I get married, you know, when I don't know what else to do. It's one of my panic things" she wrote in Faithfull, later telling British Vogue that "the thing that always ruined my relationships was drugs."

In recent years, Faithfull continued to churn out a steady stream of records, most recently in 2021 with the spoken word album She Walks in Beauty, which served as a tribute to Romantic-era poets like Keats, Byron and Shelley.

Despite her work — she also appeared in a stage production of The Seven Deadly Sins in 2012 — Faithfull faced many a health scare, including breast cancer and hepatitis C.

"Being very young and silly, I was drawn to everything that was as decadent as possible. I am [74] and I'm paying for all that," she told Vogue in 2021. "I really wish I had never had a cigarette, particularly, or any drug or alcohol in my life. I didn't know when I was in my [20s]…what it would do to me. I always thought I would die young, I never expected to get to this age."

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