GlobalWoman · Find your way in the world
Marianne Faithfull: muse, survivor, heroine
Some women are muses. Some are legends. Marianne Faithfull was both.
The lowdown
Who was Marianne Faithfull?
Marianne Faithfull was an English singer, songwriter and actor, the daughter of an Austrian baroness, who became the face of 1960s London and Mick Jagger’s partner. After years of addiction and homelessness, she returned in 1979 with Broken English, reinventing herself as one of rock’s great survivors. She died in January 2025, aged 78.
At a glance
Muse is too small a word for her. Marianne inspired. She endured, unravelled and burned down every version of herself until she found the one who could survive.
A Capricorn Sun, ruled by Saturn, the planet of time, hardship and hard-won wisdom, she was built for the long game. Saturn always makes you work, and it made her work harder than most.
Her life
The life of Marianne Faithfull
From baroness’s daughter to legend.
Born in London, the daughter of an Austrian baroness and a British intelligence officer turned scholar.
Discovered at a party at seventeen. Her first single, “As Tears Go By”, becomes a hit.
Begins her relationship with Mick Jagger, and becomes the face of Swinging London.
The relationship ends. Years of addiction follow, and for a time she lives on the streets of Soho.
Returns with Broken English, and is nominated for a Grammy.
Releases her final album, She Walks in Beauty, setting Romantic poetry to music.
Dies in London, aged 78.
The roots
An aristocratic inheritance
Marianne Faithfull was born into a family that read like a novel. Her mother, Eva, was an Austrian baroness and a former dancer, and through her, Marianne was the great-great-niece of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the writer of Venus in Furs, whose name gave the world the word “masochism”.
Her father, Glynn Faithfull, had worked in British intelligence during the war, then became a lecturer in Renaissance literature. Her parents separated when she was young, and she grew up in Reading with her mother, educated at a convent school.
Old-world glamour, a famous name,
and not much money.
It was a strange inheritance, and a useful one.
The muse
The face of the sixties
In 1964, at seventeen, Marianne was spotted at a London party by Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones’ manager. Within weeks she was recording “As Tears Go By”, a song written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and it became a hit.
Two years later, she began her relationship with Jagger. For the next four years they were the golden couple of Swinging London, and she was cast, over and over, as the muse: the beautiful girl beside the rock star.
Sister Morphine
The song she co-wrote
She co-wrote the Rolling Stones’ “Sister Morphine”, but for decades her name was left off the credits. She fought to have it restored, and won.
The tabloid myth
The story she outlived
After a police raid on Keith Richards’ house in 1967, the press invented a lurid story about her that followed her for life. She spent decades calmly correcting it, and refusing to let a headline write her.
Songs have been linked to her ever since. But she was never only the inspiration. She was the artist too.
Nine questions. Nine muses. Find the one who is showing you the way.
The descent
Into the underworld
When the relationship with Jagger ended in 1970, Marianne’s life came apart. Addiction took hold. She lost custody of her son, and for a time she lived on the streets of Soho.
Like Inanna at the gates of the underworld, she was stripped of everything: the beauty, the fame, the role she’d been given.
She went all the way down.
The return
The transformation: a voice forged in fire
A voice forged in fire.
When Inanna returned from the underworld, she was not the same. And when Faithfull resurfaced, she was someone entirely new.
Her voice, once soft, breathy and weightless, had turned into something raw, cracked and filled with history. She had been stripped down to nothing, and in that nothingness, she had found her true voice.
Her resurrection came in the form of Broken English in 1979. It was an album that was also an invocation. Gone was the ingénue. In her place stood a woman who had seen the abyss and lived to tell the tale.
The music was jagged, furious and unapologetic. “Why D’Ya Do It” was a spitfire of rage, the title track pulsed with political unrest, and every note carried the weight of her survival.
She never returned to the girl she once was.
That girl had died in the underworld.
The legacy
A legacy written in survival
Marianne Faithfull’s story wasn’t defined by tragedy. It was one of transformation and survival.
She refused to be defined by her lowest moments, or to stay the beautiful ghost of a long-gone decade. For more than forty years after Broken English, she kept making records, acting and performing, her voice deepening with every one, right up to her final album in 2021.
Like Inanna, she descended, was stripped bare,
and emerged scarred, unbreakable
and more powerful than before.
The way through
How Marianne Faithfull helps you find your way in the world
Marianne Faithfull spent years being someone else’s muse. She found her way in the world by becoming her own.
Find your way in the world, even if it means going all the way down first.
Find your way in the world. Find your voice.
Muse. Survivor. Heroine. Always. Which muse is carrying you through?
