The singer and actress Marianne Faithfull has passed away at the age of 78, as announced by her representative.

Known for hits such as “As Tears Go By”, which reached the top 10 of the UK charts in 1964, as well as for roles in films like The Girl On A Motorcycle (1968), Faithfull left her mark on both music and cinema.

“It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of singer, songwriter, and actress Marianne Faithfull,” the official statement reads. “Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, surrounded by her beloved family. She will be greatly missed.”

Born in London in 1946, Faithfull had aristocratic Austrian ancestry on her mother’s side—her great-great-grandfather, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, wrote the erotic novel Venus in Furs. However, she grew up in a modest home in Reading.

As a teenager, she moved to London, where she met the Rolling Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham. He asked Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to write her first single, “As Tears Go By”, in 1964, which climbed into the UK Top 10. By 1965, she had three more songs in the UK Top 10, which also entered the US Top 40.

At the same time, she began her career in theater, participating in performances such as Chekhov’s Three Sisters, alongside Glenda Jackson, and in Hamlet, playing Ophelia, with Angelica Huston as her understudy. She revealed that she performed the “madness” scenes under the influence of heroin.

In cinema, she starred alongside legends such as Orson Welles, Oliver Reed, Alain Delon, and Anna Karina, and portrayed herself in Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in the USA in 1966.

Despite her fame as an icon of the “swinging London” era, her relationship with the Rolling Stones made her even more well-known. In 1965, she married artist John Dunbar and had a son, Nicholas, but soon divorced and became involved with Mick Jagger for four years.

Faithfull was considered the muse of the Rolling Stones. She once told Jagger, “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away,” a phrase that became the chorus of “Wild Horses”. Her struggles with drugs inspired songs like “Dear Doctor” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. “I knew I was being used for those songs. It was for a good cause,” she once said.

She co-wrote the song “Sister Morphine”, which was recorded with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Ry Cooder, and later by the Rolling Stones on their album Sticky Fingers. However, her recognition as a songwriter came only after a lengthy legal battle.

Her addiction to cocaine and heroin worsened, and her reputation was severely damaged in 1967 when she was found naked and wrapped in a fur blanket during a police raid at Keith Richards’ house, along with Richards, Jagger, and six other men. “It destroyed me,” she later said. “A man in that situation is considered charming. A woman, however, becomes a ‘bad mother.'”

In 1970, she lost custody of her son, divorced Jagger, and ended up homeless on the streets of Soho in London, trying to detox from heroin. “I lived in a fake world in the ’60s,” she said in 2016. “When I lived on the streets, I realized how good people are. I washed my clothes in a Chinese restaurant, and the tea vendor would give me cups of tea.” Gradually, she recovered, and in 1976, she released the album Dreamin’ My Dreams.

In 1979, she made a powerful comeback with the album Broken English, which was nominated for a Grammy and showcased a new, darker style. From 1985 onward, she permanently quit drugs and continued to release music, collaborating with artists such as Nick Cave, Damon Albarn, Emmylou Harris, Beck, and Metallica. She released a total of 21 studio albums.

Marianne Faithfull married and divorced twice more, first to Ben Brierly of the Vibrators and then to actor Giorgio Della Terza, about whom she said in 2011, “He was American and he was a nightmare.” She continued her acting career, portraying God in two episodes of Absolutely Fabulous, the Devil in The Black Rider, and Empress Maria Theresa in Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette.

In her later years, she lived in Paris. After the terrorist attack at the Bataclan in 2015, she wrote the song “They Come at Night” on the day of the attack.

Faithfull faced numerous health issues. In 2007, she announced she had hepatitis C, and in 2006, she underwent successful surgery for breast cancer. She also suffered from arthritis and other joint conditions. In the early 1970s, she struggled with anorexia during her heroin addiction. In 2020, she contracted COVID-19 and was hospitalized for 22 days.