Monday Muses: Marianne Faithfull

Any excuse to post pictures of 60s-era Marianne Faithfull on a dull Monday, am I right?  I do love Marianne but it’s always ever-so-slightly bittersweet to see pictures of her at the beginning of her career, knowing how far she would fall.  Despite the fact that she managed to make a miraculous rebound from all of that, her's has been one rough tale. 

Arguably known by most as girlfriend / muse to Mick Jagger - Marianne would, in a sense, eventually become her own muse.  She hit the scene in the Sixties as a doll-faced ingenue of alleged aristocratic lineage, and rose to the top of the pop charts with her cover of the Jagger/Richards penned  song “As Tears Go By”.  Along with a successful music career, she tried her hand at acting too.  Notably she played Ophelia in a production of “Hamlet” directed by Tony Richardson which then lead to a film version. She also appeared in several independent and art house films.  

Somewhere along the way she began her gradual decent into the dark underbelly of drug culture.  Probably enhanced by depression and, of course, there was the infamous "Redlands drug bust" which sullied her clean reputation with some less than clean allegations and rumors.  Drug use eventually took the front seat to the point where her home life, relationships  (bye bye Mick!) and finances were left in shambles. 

In her autobiography, Faithfull, she talks at length about a period spent homeless and quite literally living on a wall in central London...yes, a wall. By then her young son had been taken from her and was living with relatives.  She was penniless and friends with the junkies, prostitutes and other homeless souls who seemed to look after each other in some form or another. Her life could have easily ended the way countless other 60s icons did.  In her own Persephone-esque manner, however, she managed to reemerge, and to even see success again later in life - albeit with many many stories to tell.  

It took a while for me to warm to her earlier music and some of it is still hit and miss for me but this

cover...

 

 and this one persuaded me into fandom....

 

I also love to watch her on film… the movie “Girl on a Motorcycle” is, in truth, a bit self-indulgent and campy but I adore it for some reason (on Netflix, last time I checked).  She also makes a couple of delightful but random cameos in French films like Godard’s “Made in USA”.

In high school I discovered her  album “Broken English” then even more recently the album “Horses and High Heels” (which, I am told, pops up on the “Meg Olsen” Pandora station from time to time…hahaha).  The former is disco-tinged new wave record from 1979 and the later an almost folkie alt-country record from 2011. Both really interesting and both quite different to each other.

If you are a fan of reading Bios her's (Faithfull: An Autobiography ) is fascinating, brutally honest and strangely optimistic.  Lastly, I had such a hard time narrowing down pictures so you can find more over at my Pinterest!