Marianne Faithfull, a pioneering artist who transcended “it girl” status in the Sixties for a stunning second act as a singer-songwriter with great depth, died Thursday at age 78.
“It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull,” the singer’s rep said in a statement. “Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family.”
Faithfull became a breakout star in 1964 with her first single, the ballad “As Tears Go By.” The beloved track would be the first song Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had written together. Although she was only 17 and her voice sounded frail and young, she sang the lyrics about feeling left out with a conviction that would guide her later work.
She reemerged in 1979 with the jaw-dropping Broken English, an album that drew musically from punk and New Wave and showcased her newfound dark, sometimes vulgar outlook. Its songs, like “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” “Guilt,” and a cover of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero,” perfectly fit the way her voice had deepened during her time away.
Thrown into fame at a young age, controversy overshadowed much of Faithfull’s early career. She was in a relationship with Jagger from 1966 until 1970 and was pilloried by the press after police raided Keith Richards’ flat for drugs and found her nude, save for a fur bedcover in 1967. Toward the end of the decade, she was homeless and addicted to heroin.
In recent years, Faithfull battled a number of health setbacks. In addition to a hepatitis-C diagnosis, she received treatment for breast cancer in 2016, and underwent shoulder-replacement surgery two years later.
At various points of her career, she revisited “As Tears Go By” several times, and marveled in an 2014 interview with Rolling Stone about how profound the song was. “I still sing it every night,” she said. “I still think it’s a beautiful song. I’m still very grateful that Mick and Keith gave it to me and wrote it for me. I suddenly really understood it myself when I was about 40, when I realized it was another version of [poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ballad] ‘The Lady of Shalott.’ It hit me during one of my moments of clarity, which I’ve told you seem to happen periodically. That moment of clarity was when I got clean.”
This story is developing.
