By Paul Robicheau

The resolute British singer/actress survived addiction, homelessness, cancer and Covid, which left her in a coma before she completed work on her final album in 2021.

Marianne Faithfull in the late ’60s. Photo: Wiki Common

Marianne Faithfull, who passed away on January 30 at the age of 78, made her mark with an indelible voice – or really, two of them.  One was the airy, girlish voice of an ingenue that first recorded the Rolling Stones classic “As Tears Go By” in 1964. The other was the cracked, coarsened intonation that hauntingly burrowed through her 1979 comeback hit “Broken English,” and then dark cabaret and alt-rock in recent decades.

Between those poles, reflecting a newfound ache both weary and worldly, the resolute British singer/actress survived addiction, homelessness, cancer and Covid, which left her in a coma before she completed work on her final album, 2021’s She Walks in Beauty. Faithfull died in London this week at age 78.

“I may have had charm and certainly beauty, and those things are not to be put down or sneezed at, but actually I worked hard too,” Faithfull told me in 2002. “I have always loved when people told Elvis what a star he was, and he’d say, ‘I just got lucky.’ But he must have known that there’s more to it than that.”

Granted, Faithfull was lucky when she met the Stones’ early manager Andrew Loog Oldman at a London party where he asked if she could sing and set her up with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to record “As Tears Go By,” a Top 5 UK hit that exuded charm and innocence. Faithfull became Jagger’s girlfriend, wrote lyrics for the band’s “Sister Morphine” and inspired “Wild Horses” among other songs. But Faithful became addicted to heroin in the wake of her time as the Stones’ muse (which included a suicide attempt) and became an anorexic junkie living on the streets of London in the ’70s.

That made her Grammy-nominated Broken English album an even more compelling story. In addition to the New Wave pulse of its title track, the record included “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” (Faithfull’s most streamed Spotify track by far), the snarling “Why’d Ya Do It”, and the definite version of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero.”

Marianne Faithfull at the Paradise Rock Club in 2022. Photo: Paul Robicheau

Not that her battle with addiction was over. Faithfull said she held a “special place in my heart for Boston” since she kicked heroin while living here in the mid-’80s. That began a period where she adopted more of a cabaret style, encouraged by producer Hal Willner for 1987’s Strange Weather. Inspired by the music of Germany’s Weimar Republic, Faithfull also celebrated the operatic songs of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht on her 1996 live album 20th Century Blues. And the year before, she explored the gentler side of her voice over orchestrations by composer/producer Angelo Badalamenti (of David Lynch “Twin Peaks” fame) on A Secret Life, highlighted by the swooning “She.”

But Faithfull made one of her most interesting moves — and one not as widely noted – over the next decade. Starting with 2022’s Kissin’ Time, which featured Beck, Blur and Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, the singer gravitated toward collaborations with disparate younger performers. “For the new century, we needed a new Marianne,” she told me. “My manager said, “Just make a list in your head of people that you’d like to work with. I had to know their work and really like it… and they had to like me!”

Compatibility grew more natural over mid-decade work. Faithfull blended voices with PJ Harvey and Nick Cave for 2005’s Before the Poison. Cave returned for the 2008 gem Easy Come, Easy Go, also featuring Chan Marshall (Cat Power), Rufus Wainwright, Keith Richards, and Antony (now Anohni) Hegarty, who duets in a particularly stunning revision of Smokey Robinson’s “Ooo Baby Baby” that slides from keen crooning to a funky bridge. Willner noted that musicians in that album’s backing band (which included guitarist Marc Ribot, bassist Greg Cohen, trumpeter Steve Bernstein, and saxman Lenny Pickett) were amazed how Faithfull nailed songs in one take.

From Stones classics to swan song She Walks in Beauty (where she recited romantic British poetry to music by Cave associate Warren Ellis), daring collaborations were key to Faithfull’s art – in music as well as film, with roles ranging from 1968’s The Girl with the Motorcycle to Sofia Coppola’s 2006 biopic Marie Antoinette. Sometimes, her musical and visual realms collided. Check out the 1973 clip below of The Midnight Special television show where she performs “As Tears Go By” as well as a cabaret-style “20^th Century Blues” with dancers, plus a duet with David Bowie on the Sonny and Cher favorite “I Got You, Babe.” The pair’s outfits are a hoot, between Bowie’s feathery breastplate and her headpiece akin to a nun’s habit.

Faithfull, after all, was raised in a Catholic boarding school. In her 1994 autobiography (she wrote more than one, just as she recorded multiple versions of “As Tears Go By”), Marianne Faithfull said “Ever since my days at the convent, my secret heroes had been decadents, aesthetes, doomed Romantics, mad Bohemians and opium-eaters.” That framed the world of a singular talent who pursued an oft-perilous life with brave gusto.

Paul Robicheau served more than 20 years as contributing editor for music at the Improper Bostonian in addition to writing and photography for the Boston Globe, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He was also the founding arts editor of Boston Metro.