Marianne Faithfull was the ultimate poster child for the “freewheeling spirit of the 1960s”, says The Times. By the end of the decade, she had slept with three of the Rolling Stones, spent four years with Mick Jagger as “swinging London’s most fêted celebrity couple”, and become the stuff of urban legend when police raided Keith Richards’s house during a drug-fuelled party and found her wearing nothing but a fur rug. She denied reports that she was “performing an intimate act involving a Mars bar” at the time, and the “fair-minded” were inclined to believe her. Particularly after her 1994 kiss-and-tell memoir, Faithfull, in which, to put it mildly, “candour was her custom”. The book was especially cruel about Jagger, portraying him as a “fastidious snob who was secretly in love with Richards”.

Faithfull was born in 1946 in Hampstead, London, the daughter of Glynn Faithfull, a British spy during World War Two, and Eva von Sacher-Masoch, a Viennese baroness descended from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of the 1870 novel Venus in Furs. She left home at 17 after she was spotted at a party by Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who thought she looked like “an angel with big breasts”. But after a whirlwind decade – she later said “if I wasn’t there, it didn’t happen” – she walked out of Jagger’s Cheyne Walk house, sank into drug addiction, made multiple suicide attempts and ended up living on the streets. “It made me realise that human beings were really good,” she recalled. “The Chinese restaurant let me wash my clothes there. The man who had the tea stall gave me free cups of tea.” Her road to recovery was marked by a refusal to feel sorry for herself. “I don’t feel cursed,” she said in one of her final interviews. “I just feel f***ing human.”

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