Marianne Faithfull, British pop star and actor, dies aged 78

In short:

British pop star Marianne Faithfull has died peacefully in the company of her family in London, aged 78.

The singer was most known for inspiring helping to write some of the Rolling Stones' greatest songs, and dated frontman Mick Jagger for several years.

She also created her own musical legacy, specialising in genteel ballads before her voice cracked and coarsened.

British pop star Marianne Faithfull, who inspired and helped write some of the Rolling Stones' greatest songs, has died aged 78.

Faithfull passed away on Thursday in London, according to her music promotion company Republic Media.

"It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull," a company spokesperson said in a statement. 

British pop star Marianne Faithfull has died peacefully in the company of her family in London, aged 78. (AP: Markus Schreiber)

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

Faithfull was a celebrity before turning 17, homeless by her mid-20s and an inspiration to peers and younger artists by her early 30s, when her raw, explicit Broken English album brought her the kinds of reviews the Stones had received. 

The singer was most known for helping to write some of the Rolling Stones' greatest songs, and for dating frontman Mick Jagger for several years. (AP: Peter Kemp)

Over the following decades, her admirers would include Beck, Billy Corgan, Nick Cave and PJ Harvey, although her history would always be closely tied to the Stones and to the years she dated Mick Jagger.

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 publicised 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.

"One of the hazards of reforming your evil ways is that some people won't let go of their mind's eye of you as a wild thing," she wrote in her 2007 memoir Memories, Dreams and Reflections.

Jagger and Richards often cited bluesmen and early rock 'n rollers as their prime influences, but Faithfull and her close friend Anita Pallenberg, Richards's longtime partner, also opened the band to new ways of thinking. 

Both were worldlier than their boyfriends at the time, and helped transform the Stones' songwriting and personas, whether as muses or as collaborators.

Faithfull and Jagger first started seeing each other in 1966 and became one of the most glamorous and notorious couples of "Swinging London". (AFP: Leeimage)

Faithfull helped inspire such Stones songs as the mellow tribute She Smiled Sweetly and the lustful Let's Spend the Night Together. 

It was Faithful who lent Jagger the Russian novel The Master and Margarita that was the basis for Sympathy for the Devil and who first recorded and contributed lyrics to the Stones' dire Sister Morphine, notably the opening line, "Here I lie in my hospital bed." 

Faithfull's drug use helped shape such jaded takes on the London rock scene as You Can't Always Get What You Want and Live with Me, while her time with Jagger also coincided with one of his most vulnerable love songs, Wild Horses. 

On her own, Faithfull specialised at first in genteel ballads, among them Come Stay With Me, Summer Nights and This Little Bird, but even in her teens, Faithfull sang in a fragile alto that suggested knowledge and burdens far beyond her years. 

Her voice would later crack and coarsen, and her life and work after splitting with Jagger in 1970 was one of looking back and carrying on through emotional and physical pain.

Early in her career Faithfull specialised in genteel ballads, such as 'Come Stay With Me,', 'Summer Nights' and 'This Little Bird'. (Reuters: File image)

She released 21 solo albums over the course of her career, including the critically acclaimed "Broken English" in 1979 that won her a Grammy nomination.

She had become addicted to heroin in the late 1960s, suffered a miscarriage while seven months pregnant and nearly died from an overdose of sleeping pills. 

By the early 1970s, Faithfull was living in the streets of London and had lost custody of the son, Nicholas, she had with her estranged husband, the gallery owner John Dunbar. 

She would also battle anorexia and hepatitis, was treated for breast cancer, broke her hip in a fall and was hospitalised for three weeks and was induced into a coma with COVID-19 in 2020.

She shared everything, uncensored, in her memoirs and in her music, notably Broken English, which came out in 1979 and featured her seething Why'd Ya Do It and conflicted Guilt, in which she chants "I feel guilt, I feel guilt, though I know I've done no wrong." 

Other albums included Dangerous Acquaintances, Strange Weather, the live Blazing Away and, most recently, She Walks in Beauty. 

AP