Legendary Singer Marianne Faithfull Dies At 78

Beloved vocalist/actress Marianne Faithfull, who rose to fame amid the 1960s U.K. rock revolution and had a tumultuous relationship with the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, died today (Jan. 30) in London. She was 78. Per a statement, she “passed away peacefully, in the company of her loving family.”

No cause of death was revealed, but Faithfull apparently never recovered from COVID-19 complications that rendered her unable to sing in recent years.

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Faithfull was a fledgling folk singer in the early 1960s when she met Rolling Stones producer Andrew Loog Oldham, who suggested the 17-year-old record the Jagger/Keith Richards-written “As Tears Go By.” The song was a No. 9 U.K. hit in 1964 and also reached No. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Stones also scored a hit with their own version, which was released in late 1965.

Faithfull scored additional U.K. top 10s in 1965 with “This Little Bird,” “Come and Stay With Me” and “Summer Nights,” which raised her profile in tandem with a tabloid-fodder romance with Jagger. In an oft-repeated tale, she was clad in nothing but a fur rug when police raised Richards’ house in a 1967 drug bust.

“They emerged with their reputations amplified as dangerous, glamorous outlaws,” she wrote of the Stones and the fallout from the incident in Faithfull, her 1994 autobiography. “I was destroyed by the very things that enhanced them”

As the decade wore on, she sang both on the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and co-wrote the Stones’ “Sister Morphine,” which belied her own struggles with drug addiction. She went nearly a decade without releasing an album until 1976’s Dreamin’ My Dreams, but returned to form with the 1979 effort Broken English, which dabbled in au courant new wave and disco influences.

Later career highlights included singing with Roger Waters on his 1990 The Wall solo tour, duetting with Metallica on 1997’s “The Memory Remains” and the 2022 album Kissin Time, which found her interpreting songs penned by Billy Corgan, Blur and Beck. In 2018, she scored her highest-charting U.K. album in 53 years with Negative Capability. Her final release was 2021’s She Walks in Beauty, on which she set British romantic poetry to music written by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds member Warren Ellis.

Faithfull also acted in such films as 1966’s Made in U.S.A., 1967’s I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname (in which she was allegedly the first person to say “f-ck”), Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and 2007’s Irina Palm, for which she was nominated as Best Actress by the European Film Awards.

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.