First off: she had the face of an angel, a cherub. Wide eyes, silken blonde hair, perfect skin, the whole business. You might have had the apprehension that Marianne Faithfull’s ladder to fame in the swinging sixties of London started with modeling. But you’d be wrong. The daughter of progressive parents, she picked up an acoustic guitar in 1964, when she was just 18. Not too long after that, in the company of her soon-to-be husband John Dunbar (it would be a short-lived marriage), she went to a party thrown by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham. The music mogul made her his “discovery” and summarily ordered his other charges, a pair of fellows named Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, to write a song for her. “As Tears Go By,” which the pair initially considered tripe (have to keep up the bad boy image, you know — what kinds of reprobates compose such a tender tune?) was one of the first Jagger/Richard originals.
The combination of that cherubic face and her seemingly ingenuous delivery made the song, and Faithfull, a sensation. She was soon caught up in the increasingly wild world of the Stones, via a love affair with Mick Jagger. It would make a great change in her. One that we can track via her film appearances.
Her first appearance in a feature was as herself, in Made In USA, a brutal film by French pot-stirrer Jean-Luc Godard. Despite it being made in 1966, it was one of several Godard films that cast a cold eye on what he accurately predicted — the fizzling of 1960s idealism. Her appearance is framed in a fractured detective tale in which Anna Karina, Godard’s soon-to-be-ex-wife, plays a hardboiled detective whose “case” is interrupted by musings on the Kennedy assassination and the “disappearance” of Moroccan nationalist Mehdi Ben Barka. In the midst of all the justified paranoia, there’s a bar scene. Karina is hanging out with Godard stalwarts Jean-Pierre Leaud and Laszlo Szabo, and over in a booth, Marianne is asking a companion to “dit-moi quelque chose.” (“Tell me something.”) The companion, a sour-faced bald guy, storms off. She looks into her coffee cup, looks up, and begins, a cappella, “It is the evening of the day…” She sings it in its entirety and Godard cuts to Karina and Leaud reacting, nervously, before settling on Faithfull, light freckles on her face, smiling enigmatically as she finishes the song. It’s an unabashedly beautiful scene, an oasis of romantic melancholy in the desert of fragmented alienation the film portrays.
Life handed Faithfull some bitter experiences after that. She was with Mick and Keith at Redlands, Keith Richards’ country home, when British cops made a drug raid. The whole thing ended up something of an embarrassment for the authorities, who were seen as trying to make martyrs out of the Stones. But it was a genuine immediate embarrassment for Faithfull: the British tabloids falsely alleged that she was nude at the time of the raid and left the premises wrapped in a blanked. There were even more scurrilous rumors concerning a Mars bar supposedly on her person. (And we should emphasize that all this was utterly false.) While the Stones already had, and to some extent luxuriated in, their bad boy image, Faithfull was not seeking any such tarnishing.
Nevertheless, she had acquired an air of danger that was salutary with respect to her next major film role. Cinematographer turned director Jack Cardiff (who in his role as D.P, oversaw the Powell/Pressburger classics The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and others) cast her in the title role in Girl on a Motorcycle. As Cardiff recalls in his superb memoir Magic Hour, this was a movie that would absolutely live up to its title. “To show a girl on a motorcycle for almost the entire film was a stimulating challenge.” Both tough and super-sexy in her black leather jumpsuit, Faithfull’s character Rebecca muses on what’s in store for her when she reaches her ultimate destination, a liaison with her lover, played by Alain Delon. (It was during the making of this film that the notorious candid shot of Faithfull and Delon yucking is up while a sullen Jagger sulks on the couch beside them was taken. Faithfull insisted the photo told a fake story, and that Mick’s moment of disengagement was just that — a stray moment.) As the exasperated Cardiff points out in his book, the florid dialogue that takes place between the two, and that got the film critically lambasted, is florid for a reason — it’s all in Rebecca’s mind, her imaginings while she’s on a journey that’s not (minor spoiler alert) going to end as she anticipated. The movie was a terrific success, in any event.
Her film career seemed to keep pace with her songwriting: she composed the staggering “Sister Morphine,” the autobiographical content of which has never been entirely reliably detailed, around the same time as she appeared as Ophelia opposite Nicol Williamson’s quirky Hamlet in director Tony Richardson’s film of the Shakespeare play. In her original recording of “Morphine” you can hear the beginnings of the rasp that would redefine her singing voice when she made a decisive return to record-making in the late ‘70s with the hard-bitten, haunting album Broken English, made while she was still contending with drug addiction. She found a musical soulmate in the States with producer Hal Willner, who continued to put that inspired rasp in musical settings featuring incredible players such as Bill Frisell, Robert Quine, Dr. John and others. She went on to work with David Lynch’s musical conjurer Angelo Badalamenti and U2 alchemist Daniel Lanois. Her track record on wax is almost unimpeachable. And she kept that up, along with live performing, into her battle with breast cancer in the early aughts.
While her film work didn’t always yield similarly outstanding results, she always enhanced whatever she appeared in (including a three-episode role on the British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, playing, who else, God) and was outstanding in small roles in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and, most recently in a voice-only role as a Bene Gesserit ancestor in 2021’s Dune. She’s also moving in the title role of the 2007 tearjerker-with-a-difference Irina Palm, as a grandmum taking unusually desperate measures to pay for her grandchild’s medical care. The role is an eyebrow raising one — a glory hole is involved — but Faithfull, who came to embrace the role of artistic provocateur, would likely not have had it any other way.
Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.
