Singer and actress Marianne Faithfull dies aged 78

Marianne Faithfull, the wild woman of London's Swinging '60s who survived drug addiction, homelessness, two comas, cancer and COVID-19, died at age 78, after a singing career that began as a teenager and lasted until her 70s.

"It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull," her spokesperson said in a statement on Thursday.

"Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed."

The Rolling Stones on Thursday led tributes to Sixties music icon, adding she would be forever remembered.

Posting an old black-and-white picture of the two of them, her past lover Mick Jagger said he was "so saddened" by the news.

Faithfull was "so much part of my life for so long. She was a wonderful friend, a beautiful singer and a great actress. She will always be remembered," he wrote on Instagram.

In recent years, the British pop-rock balladeer, with a distinctive low voice in her later career, had battled illness, including breast cancer and a severe bout of Covid.

Faithfull got her first break in 1964, after being discovered by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham.

She shot to fame with her hit As Tears Go By, written by Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards, who were introduced to her by Oldham.

Her slow, haunting voice seemed to portend a darker side to the British pop sound that was winning hearts around the world with the breezy early tunes of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

Faithfull became addicted to heroin and suffered from anorexia when the relationship ended, spending two years living on the streets of London's Soho district in the early 1970s.

But no matter how hard she fell, Faithfull always bounced back. She released 21 solo albums, including the critically acclaimed Broken English in 1979 that won her a Grammy nomination, wrote three autobiographies and had a film acting career.

Her most recent comeback was in 2020 when she caught COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic and went into a coma during a three-week stay at a London hospital.

Her son Nicholas later told her the medical staff were so sure she would not recover that they wrote a note on the chart at the bottom of her bed recommending, "Palliative care only".

"They thought I was going to croak!" Faithfull told the New York Times in April 2021.

But she got better and within a year she finished the album she had been working on before falling sick: She Walks in Beauty, a collection of Romantic-era poems read by her and set to music.

She later complained of symptoms of long COVID such as tiredness, breathing problems and lack of memory and had to cut short a podcast interview in June 2021.

In March 2022, Faithfull was moved into Denville Hall, a retirement home in London that houses actors and other professional performers, according to several media reports.