“It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull. Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed,” the statement said.
Faithfull was known for her 1960’s hits including “As Tears Go By” which was written by The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, whom she also famously dated.
She was discovered at a party in London by The Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham in 1964 and was just 16 years old when “As Tears Go By” was released, according to her biography on her official website.
She has been making music for over 50 years, and was also an actress in the film Girl on a Motorcycle which came out in 1968 as well as Hamlet in 1969 and others.
But at the end of the 1960s she had fallen into a deep battle with drug addiction which would endure for years, according to her bio, before mounting a series of creative comebacks in the following decades.
In 2020, it was announced that Bohemian Rhapsody star Lucy Boynton would play Faithfull in a biopic about her life. At the time Faithfull said she was “delighted that my story is finally being made with my dream team.”
In 2021 Faithfull wrote an album during Covid-19 lockdown, a period in which she also struggled with a severe Covid-19 infection.
Faithfull reflected on her extraordinary and turbulent life in a memoir released in 1994.
“Never apologize, never explain – didn’t we always say that? Well, I haven’t and I don’t,” she wrote to readers in the book, titled Faithfull.
According to Reuters, Faithfull was 78 years old.