“I wish people didn’t just think of me in the ’60s,” Marianne Faithfull told an interviewer almost exactly a decade ago. “I’m not any era. I just go on and on.”
With Faithfull’s death yesterday, in London, at the age of 78, the world lost not only the stylish and decadent muse of the Rolling Stones—in the Swinging London of the Sixties, she had intense relationships with Brian Jones, Keith Richards, and, infamously, Mick Jagger—but an actor of stage and screen, writer, singer, artist, and groundbreaking and shape-shifting musician who recorded 22 studio albums spanning seven decades.
Woven into the relationships, the work, and the life, though, was perhaps Faithfull’s most lasting quality: She persisted. Faithfull inhabited the sort of outsized spirit that seemed predestined for both greatness and heartbreak, and decade after decade, tumult after tumult, she wielded and reinvented her creativity to steer herself forward through the fire.
Born in 1946 to a father who worked in British intelligence and a dancer mother who traced her lineage to the Habsburg Dynasty, Faithfull was also, on her mother’s side, the great-great niece of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (whose 1870 novel Venus in Furs gave us the terms “masochism” and “S&M”). Faithfull was discovered in 1964, at a Rolling Stones record-release party, by the band’s manager Andrew Loog Oldham, and in short order, she recorded the Stones’ song “As Tears Go By”—the first song ever written by Jagger and Richards—and promptly became a pop sensation.
