NEW YORK β Marianne Faithfull, the British pop star, muse, libertine and old soul who inspired and helped write some of the Rolling Stones' greatest songs and endured as a torch singer and survivor of the lifestyle she once embodied, has died.
She was Faithfull passed away Thursday in London, her music promotion company Republic Media said. She will be dearly missed. 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.
She was a wonderful friend, a beautiful singer and a great actress. Both were worldlier than their boyfriends at the time, and helped transform the Stones' songwriting and personas, whether as muses or as collaborators. Her voice would later crack and coarsen, and her life and work after splitting with Jagger in was one of looking back and carrying on through emotional and physical pain.
She had become addicted to heroin in the late '60s, suffered a miscarriage while seven months pregnant and nearly died from an overdose of sleeping pills. Jagger, meanwhile, had an affair with Pallenberg and had a baby with actor Marsha Hunt. By the early '70s, 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 hospitalized with COVID in Her interests extended to theater, film and television.
Faithful was married three times, and in recent years dated her manager, Francois Ravard. Jagger was her most famous lover, but other men in her life included Richards "so great and memorable," she would say of their one-night stand , David Bowie and the early rock star Gene Pitney. Among the rejected: Bob Dylan, who had been so taken that he was writing a song about her, until Faithfull, pregnant with her son at the time, turned him down.
