The China Mail - Marianne Faithfull: from muse to master

Long known for her tempestuous relationship with the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger -- who, with bandmate Keith Richards, penned her haunting hit "As Tears Go By" in 1964 -- she shook off the mantle of "muse" to carve out her own unique musical niche.

She was born on December 29, 1946 into a glamorous aristocrat family in London -- her mother was an Austro-Hungarian baroness and her father an erudite British spy.

Faithfull made her first tentative appearances on the folk scene before being drawn into the swirling orbit of the Stones.

She brought bohemian sophistication and an innate sense of style to the suburban Jagger after being introduced to him by the Stones' manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who famously dismissed her as "an angel with big tits".

"I was treated as somebody who not only can't even sing, but doesn't really write, just something you can make into something," she later said.

Yet her cut-glass delivery gave an eerie melancholy to such upbeat songs as "This Little Bird", "Go Away From My World", "Morning Sun" and "Broken English".

By the time she moved in with Jagger aged 19, Faithfull had already been briefly married and had a son.

As well as co-writing "Sister Morphine", she has been credited with inspiring the classic songs "You Can't Always Get What You Want" and "Sympathy for the Devil", after introducing Jagger to Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov's classic novel "The Master and Margarita".

The pair were the king and queen of Swinging London, and Faithfull was also best friends with Anita Pallenberg, the artist and actress -- and sometime girlfriend of two other Stones members, Brian Jones and Keith Richards -- who would become another icon of the Sixties rebellion.

- Addict on the streets -

Everyone wanted a piece of her, with Faithfull appearing in Jean-Luc Godard's film "Made in USA", where she sang "As Tears Go By". She also starred opposite Glenda Jackson in Chekhov's "Three Sisters" at Britain's National Theatre.

But Faithfull was also becoming addicted to cocaine and she felt "destroyed... and judged as a bad mother" after the police gloried in revealing that they found her wearing nothing but a fur rug in a highly publicised drugs raid in 1967 that saw both Jagger and Richards convicted.

She left Jagger three years later as her life spiralled out of control and ended up living rough for nearly two years in London.

Addicted to heroin, she lost custody of her child and attempted suicide.

When she next appeared in public on a US television show in 1973 dressed as a nun to sing "I've Got You Babe" with David Bowie, her fine, faltering voice had gone, to be replaced by a deep whisky-soaked rasp that would later become her trademark.

Six years later her album "Broken English" was a revelation, not just because of the change in her voice and the way she unsparingly exposed the depths to which she had sunk, but because it was a musical tour de force.

It revived her career. But her drugs demons had not been tamed, and now living in the United States she hit the wall again in the mid-1980s.

- Living legend -

Having come out of rehab, she moved back to Ireland -- a refuge for her throughout her life -- and began reinventing herself as a jazz and blues singer.

It was there that she began to hone her musical talent, inspired by her interest in pre-war Weimar Germany, and revive her acting career, playing the mother in Pink Floyd's rock opera "The Wall" in 1990.

In the mountains south of Dublin, she also wrote the first volume of her autobiography, which was published alongside "A Collection of Her Best Recordings", featuring her old friends Richards and Stones drummer Charlie Watts and guitarist Ron Wood.

Her reputation continued to grow with a string of albums featuring collaborations with Daniel Lanois, Emmylou Harris, Pink Floyd's Roger Waters and PJ Harvey and Nick Cave.

She was now a living legend, playing herself as God in the British sitcom "Absolutely Fabulous" -- Pallenberg played the devil.

Faithfull herself then played the Devil in the Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs musical "The Black Rider".

Sofia Coppola cast her as the Empress Maria Theresa in her 2008 film "Marie Antoinette".

And she was a guest singer on a host of songs including "The Memory Remains" by the US heavy metal band Metallica.

Only in her later years, however, did her music finally fully escape the shadow of her personal life.

Her final album, "Negative Capability" (2018), which she wrote and produced in Paris, where she spent most of her last years, was a hugely acclaimed meditation on loss and loneliness.

Dogged by bad health for decades, she escaped several brushes with death, beating both breast cancer and hepatitis.

Only weeks before the end, she caused a stir when she appeared in her wheelchair in the front row of a Paris fashion show.

C.Fong--ThChM