Musician and actor Marianne Faithfull has died. She was 78.
“It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull,” her spokesperson said in a statement on Thursday.
“Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed.”
Faithfull was known for a slew of hits, including “As Tears Go By,” which was written by the Rolling Stones‘ Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, with whom she had a several-year romance.
The song reached the UK Top 10 in 1964.
Faithfull played herself in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 movie “Made in the USA,” starring Anna Karina, and made her debut onstage co-starring in Chekov’s “Three Sisters” with Glenda Jackson. She starred alongside Alain Delon in the 1968 film “The Girl on a Motorcycle,” and worked with other heavy hitters including Orson Welles and Oliver Reed.
Born in 1946 in London, Faithfull grew up in Reading but returned to the capital as a teen.
Shortly after, she met Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who set her up with Jagger and Richards. Faithfull went on to have three other UK Top 10 singles in 1965, all of which also reached the Top 40 in the US.
Faithfull married artist John Dunbar in 1965 and had a son, but left Dunbar for Jagger. They dated for four years before splitting.
The Post reached out to a rep for Jagger, now 81, for comment.
According to the Guardian, the singer was a muse for the Rolling Stones, once telling Jagger, “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away,” which inspired the band’s classic “Wild Horses.”
Her drug struggles were also the inspiration for the songs “Dear Doctor” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
As Faithfull put it: “I know they used me as a muse for those tough drug songs. I knew I was being used, but it was for a worthy cause.”
After her addiction to cocaine and heroin worsened, she was found naked, wrapped in a fur rug, during a 1967 police search of Richards’ home, alongside the guitarist, Jagger and six other men, according to the Guardian.
“It destroyed me,” Faithfull later said, per the outlet. “To be a male drug addict and to act like that is always enhancing and glamorizing. A woman in that situation becomes a slut and a bad mother.”
In the early ’70s, Faithfull lost custody of her son, broke up with Jagger and became homeless.
She lived on the streets of Soho in London as she tried to quit drugs. “I’d been living in a very fake sort of world in the ’60s,” she said in 2016. “Suddenly, when I was living on the streets … I realized that human beings were really good. The Chinese restaurant let me wash my clothes there. The man who had the tea stall gave me cups of tea.”
Slowly turning her life around, Faithfull returned to music with the 1976 country album “Dreamin’ My Dreams.”
She quit drugs for good in 1985 and continued to release music.
Faithfull married and divorced two more times, first to Ben Brierly of the punk band the Vibrators and then to actor Giorgio Della Terza.
“I’ve had a wonderful life with all my lovers, and husbands,” she said in 2011, excluding Della Terza: “He was American, and he was a nightmare.”
In her later years, Faithfull lived in Paris and had various health issues. In 2007, she announced she had hepatitis C after being diagnosed 12 years prior.
The actress also underwent a successful surgery following a 2006 breast cancer diagnosis.
Faithfull is survived by her son, Nicholas Dunbar.
