If Alfred Hitchcock hadn’t already used it for one of his masterpieces, The Woman Who Lived Twice would be the perfect title for the life and work of Marianne Faithfull. In fact, even twice seems insufficient. This endlessly fascinating artist—who has recently passed away—lived many lives, each marked by extremes: drama, depression, ecstatic highs, and fevered passions.
Even before she ever stepped up to a microphone, Marianne Faithfull was already a character. The daughter of a British intelligence officer and an Austro-Hungarian baroness—herself a descendant of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of Venus in Furs—she was educated by nuns in a convent boarding school. In the glimmering, swinging London of the mid-1960s, she was a luminous, seductive presence, impossible to overlook. At sixteen, she married noted gallerist John Dunbar, had a child, and was swiftly swept into the orbit of the avant-garde, where she met Mick Jagger and found her gateway to the pop stage. The Rolling Stones lured her from her husband, secured her a contract with Decca, and launched her with the bittersweet ballad As Tears Go By, a hit that cemented her early stardom.
In those years, it was nearly impossible to separate the myth from the woman. To the public, Marianne was an aristocrat who had descended from the upper floors of society to grace the pop scene—never mind that her family was penniless and her convent education a result of charity. She was dismissed as a pretty face with no talent, even though her early recordings were far from the failures she later claimed. One album in particular deserves a closer listen—Come My Way, produced and arranged by the excellent Jon Mark, where the young Faithfull expressed an earnest desire to become a folk singer in the vein of Joan Baez. The instrumental textures were refined, and the repertoire held more depth than it was given credit for.
That artistic path soon closed. By the end of the ’60s, Faithfull was dabbling in theater—Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Shakespeare’s Hamlet (as Ophelia)—and trying her hand at songwriting. One of her most striking early compositions, Sister Morphine, told of a dying man pleading with a nun to ease his agony with morphine. The song was buried on a B-side and eventually censored. The warning went unheeded: instead of exorcising addiction through art, Marianne succumbed to it. Her romance with Jagger crumbled after a traumatic abortion, leaving her emotionally shattered, financially destitute, and creatively adrift.
The 1970s were a purgatory. She lost custody of her son, attempted suicide, lived unhoused on the streets of London for two years, squatting where she could. By the time she turned thirty in late 1976, her name had all but vanished from public consciousness.
I’m old enough to remember the shock of hearing Broken English in late 1979—her unexpected return. Like many, I felt dizzy with disbelief. Could this possibly be the same Marianne Faithfull—the sexy fairy from the pop songs of fifteen years earlier? Her voice was unrecognizable: rough-edged, soaked in bitterness, aching with truth. Gone were the sweet illusions of the ’60s, replaced by an unsettling but powerful blend of folk, rock, and electronic textures. She had found the right partner in guitarist Barry Reynolds and, with him, built a compelling new body of work—The Ballad of Lucy Jordan (eerily autobiographical), Fallen From Grace, Blue Millionaire, and a stunning reimagining of Lennon’s Working Class Hero. Still, heroin clung to her like a shadow. Only after an intense rehab stint did she begin to access the full breadth of her musical powers.
Then came Strange Weather in 1987, a watershed moment. Produced by Hal Willner, the album unveiled a new persona: a timeless chanteuse, equal parts Edith Piaf and Billie Holiday—fragile, haunted, fiercely emotive. Willner surrounded her with a stellar ensemble—Bill Frisell, Fernando Saunders, Robert Quine—and crafted a repertoire that interwove classic standards, new compositions (notably the Tom Waits–penned title track), and reimaginings of her past, including a haunting new take on As Tears Go By.
Willner’s name appears on several of her finest albums: the live Blazing Away, the sweeping Easy Come, Easy Go, and selections from Horses and High Heels. Perhaps Faithfull should have stayed more closely aligned with him—his taste and vision guided her along luminous, unexpected paths through the Great Songbook: from Ellington to Randy Newman, from Leonard Bernstein to Morrissey, Brian Eno to the Decemberists, Bessie Smith to Brecht.
But she was restless, voracious, unwilling to be confined. She made missteps—two albums with Angelo Badalamenti that never quite found their footing—alongside ambitious forays into Weill and Brecht (20th Century Blues, The Seven Deadly Sins) and cerebral projects like setting Shakespeare’s sonnets to music with cellist Vincent Segal. Even in her less successful efforts, that unmistakable voice cut through—a voice that didn’t need to shout to command attention. She had no formal technique, but she had lived. Her first biographer, David Dalton, put it best: “An alchemical transformation has taken place between Marianne Faithfull’s life and her voice. All the misfortunes and pain she suffered, of whatever kind, were magically absorbed by the voice and unfailingly transformed into something rich and strange.”
Faithfull feared aging—or perhaps she sensed time was short. She poured her energy into the fertile middle decades, from thirty to seventy, before gradually retreating after the ravages of COVID. Yet even late in life, she continued to create meaningful work, collaborating with gifted younger songwriters and commissioning pieces tailored to her singular presence. Artists like Beck, Billy Corgan, Damon Albarn, and Jarvis Cocker rose to the occasion (Kissin’ Time is essential), as did Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Steve Earle, and Ed Harcourt, whose fingerprints are found on Before the Poison and Give My Love to London.
Between recording sessions, she made a few noteworthy film appearances—regal and remote as Maria Theresa in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, or devastatingly real in Irina Palm, where she played a desperate grandmother forced into sex work to pay for her grandson’s medical treatments.
Her final album, She Walks in Beauty (2021), is a luminous swan song: a cycle of Romantic poetry—Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth—set to music by Warren Ellis, with contributions from Nick Cave, Brian Eno, and Vincent Segal. It was a project she had dreamed of for decades, postponed again and again—until finally, fittingly, it marked her quiet exit. Once more, Marianne reached into the past to illuminate her own soul, her lifelong pursuit of beauty, the chiaroscuro that never ceased to envelop her. It’s as if Byron himself had written of her, two centuries ahead of time:
She walks in beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies / And all that’s best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes.
And, one might add: in her voice.
