Yahoo Lifestyle Marianne Faithfull, ‘As Tears Go By’ Singer, Dies at 78
Vocalist Marianne Faithfull, whose 1960s sojourn as a swinging London pop star was succeeded by a striking punk-era artistic rebirth, died Thursday in London. She was 78.
The BBC posted a statement from her family reading, “Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family.”
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Blond, blue-eyed and beautiful, Faithfull had logged a low-key career as a London coffeehouse folk performer before she was discovered at 17 by the Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham after she attended a party for the hitmaking band.
Signed to Decca in the U.K., she was launched in 1964 by the single “As Tears Go By,” co-authored by Oldham and the Stones’ Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. While her rendition, which peaked at No. 22 in the U.S., was eclipsed by the Stones’ No. 6 cover of the following year, her tremulous voice propelled four 45s into the American top 40.
In Oldham’s 2002 memoir “2Stoned,” the British novelist and journalist Nik Cohn called Faithfull “the perfect face. She looked incredibly virginal, incredibly sexual and she had the strangest sad smile you ever saw. When she sang, she sighed and she drooped her eyelids in poses of infinite lustful purity.”
By 1966, Faithfull had abandoned her marriage to artist John Dunbar after just a year, and her pop career began to take a back seat to her role as Jagger’s glamorous companion.
Jagger remembered Faithfull on social media Thursday, posting “I am so saddened to hear of the death of Marianne Faithfull. She was so much part of my life for so long. She was a wonderful friend, a beautiful singer and a great actress. She will always be remembered.”
The couple became a fixture of the tabs’ gossip columns, and in February 1967 they jumped to the front pages: Jagger and Richards were arrested in a drug possession bust at the latter’s Sussex estate Redlands, while Faithfull’s presence, clad in a fur rug, attracted scurrilous news coverage.
Though the relationship and the Stones’ career weathered the scandal, Faithfull and Jagger began to experience the strain of their celebrity. Nonetheless, she collaborated with Jagger and Richards on a song that was briefly available as her last B side: “Sister Morphine,” which she described to writer Kris Needs in 2018 as “my self-portrait in a dark mirror, my miniature gothic masterpiece, my celebration of death.”
By the time that number appeared on the Stones’ 1971 album “Sticky Fingers” in an arrangement that replicated her own, Faithfull had split with Jagger, and her life, reflecting the tune’s prophecy, had gone into a downward spiral.
The breakup of her relationship with Jagger, the miscarriage of his child (referred to in “Memo From Turner,” a song Jagger penned for the film “Performance”) and the loss of custody of her son Nicholas (from her marriage to Dunbar) led to a 1970 suicide attempt. A profound addiction to heroin led to a protracted period of homelessness on the London streets.
Though she continued to grapple with addiction into the ‘80s, when she finally embraced sobriety after a couple of rehab stints, Faithfull began to tentatively turn around her life and career in the mid-‘70s. She issued an unusual country-rock album, “Dreamin’ My Dreams,” in 1975, but her true return to prominence came four years later with “Broken English,” her debut LP for Island Records.
Singing in a newly deep, razor-edged rasp, Faithfull essayed a caustic brace of songs that included the terrorism-themed title track, John Lennon’s biting “Working Class Hero,” Dr. Hook’s study of suburban anomie “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” and poet Heathcoate Williams’ profane, fire-spitting indictment of infidelity “Why’d Ya Do It?” Embraced by critics dazzled by its punk-edged spirit, the album peaked at No. 57 in the U.S. and collected a Grammy nomination for best female rock vocal performance. A single re-release of the title cut featured a biting remake of “Sister Morphine” on its B side.
Her career completely revitalized and her persona reinvented, Faithfull’s 15 years on Island were highlighted by “Strange Weather” (No. 78, 1987), a jazz and cabaret-inflected recital, stylishly produced by Hal Willner, which featured a remake of “As Tears Go By,” and the taut live album “Blazing Away” (1990). She recorded prolifically into the teens for such labels as RCA, Virgin and Naïve, sustaining an ardent cult following.
She was born Dec. 19, 1946, in London. She was a child of the upper class, and she boasted roots in nobility; perhaps fittingly, her great-great-uncle was Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose boundary-shattering novel “Venus in Furs” spawned the term “masochism.”
Her family fell on hard times when she was young, and she was a government-subsidized student at a convent school, where her interests in music and acting developed. She dove into the cultural whirlwind of London in the early ‘60s with enthusiasm.
“I devoured papers for every scrap of hipness and outrage I could find,” she wrote in “Faithfull,” her stunningly candid 1994 memoir co-authored by David Dalton. “Articles about Brigitte Bardot and Juliette Greco. She was the big Existentialist icon. I tried my best to look like her. I used to wear white lipstick, but it didn’t really work if you were blond. I was just a typical child of my time, I guess – open to everything. I was being a teenager: curious, rebellious, in quest of the forbidden.”
Faithfull quickly fell in with London’s trendiest, and Oldham was instantly smitten when he laid eyes upon her at the Stones’ ’64 promotional event.
He wrote in “2Stoned,” “From the moment I had caught sight of her I’d recognized my next adventure. In another century you’d have set sail for her – in 1964 you recorded her.”
Those a clash of temperaments and styles led to a swift parting of the aspiring Pygmalion and his discovery, Oldham gave her a brilliant piece of debut material with a song Jagger and Richards originally called “As Time Goes By.” The single “As Tears Go By” rocketed to No. 9 in the U.K., and for a year Faithfull was white-hot on the charts.
She logged three more top-10 singles in England in 1965: “Come and Stay With Me” (No. 4,/No. 26 in the U.S.), “This Little Bird” (No. 6/No. 32 U.S.) and “Summer Nights” (No. 10/No. 24 U.S.). Her final 45 for Decca, “Something Better,” was quickly yanked from the marketplace in 1967 because of its drug-themed flip side “Sister Morphine.”
At the height of her fame and her growing notoriety – the latter fueled by the tabs’ vulgar and unsubstantiated rumors involving the deployment of a Mars candy bar during the Redlands “drug orgy” – Faithfull enjoyed a burgeoning acting career in the late ‘60s.
She played herself, singing “As Tears Go By” acapella, in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Made in U.S.A. (1966); made a sensational appearance, in a black leather body suit and in the nude, with Alain Delon in “Girl on a Motorcycle” (1968); and took the role of Ophelia opposite Nigel Williamson in Tony Richardson’s stage and film productions of “Hamlet” (1969). She performed “Something Better” in Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s unreleased 1968 telefilm “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.”
Faithfull worked on the stage in the early ‘70s before her plunge into addiction took her to the street. Her most bizarre public appearance came in a 1973 duet with David Bowie, then at the height of his early fame; clad in a nun’s habit, she dueted with the fur- and vinyl-clad Bowie on a bizarre version of Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” recorded in London for the NBC rock show “The Midnight Special.”
After her return to prominence in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, she returned to the theater and the screen. On stage, she regularly gravitated to the work of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, appearing in “The Threepenny Opera” in a 1991 production at the Gate in Dublin and Austrian productions of “The Seven Deadly Sins.” She portrayed the Devil for director Robert Wilson in the premiere 2004 production of William S. Burroughs and Tom Waits’ “The Black Rider.”
Among several latter-day TV appearances, the most notable may have been her 2001 turn as God in an episode of the hit U.K. comedy “Absolutely Fabulous,” with another former Rolling Stones paramour, Keith Richards’ ex-girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, taking the role of the Devil.
In the new millennium, she rebounded repeatedly from a host of health problems. She bowed out of tours due to exhaustion in 2005 and again in 2008. She underwent a bout with breast cancer in 2006. She was diagnosed with hepatitis C in 2007. Further tour cancellations followed a back injury in 2013 and a broken hip and subsequent infection in 2014. She was also hospitalized with Covid.
Married and divorced three times, Faithfull is survived by her son.
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