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Marianne Faithfull, rock ’n' roll chanteuse and Rolling Stones muse, dies at 78

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Marianne Faithfull, rock ’n' roll chanteuse and Rolling Stones muse, dies at 78

Marianne Faithfull, the singer, actress, steely-eyed “It” girl of Swinging ‘60s London and subject of numerous Rolling Stones songs including “Wild Horses” and “Sister Morphine,” opened her 1994 autobiography with a disclaimer: “Never apologize, never explain — didn’t we always say that? Well, I haven’t and I don’t.”

Faithfull, who once described herself as “the drug-drenched Duchy of Chelsea,” died peacefully in London on Thursday accompanied by her family, a spokesperson confirmed to The Times. She was 78 and previously had been suffering from the long-term effects of a nearly fatal COVID-19 infection in 2020. A cause of death was not revealed.

“She will be dearly missed,” the spokesperson told The Times in a statement.

Faithfull’s unflinching songs, adaptations and roller-coaster life illustrated her unapologetic approach. Described by Irish playwright Frank McGuinness as “interesting … difficult and strange,” Faithfull was descended from Austro-Hungarian aristocrats and first earned fame in 1964, at age 17, with “As Tears Go By,” written by a young Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

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Across 50 years as an artist, she issued solo albums including 1979’s bracing comeback, “Broken English,” 1987’s Hal Willner-produced “Strange Weather” and 2018’s “Negative Capabilities” with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

Along the way, she channeled her cigarette-stained rasp to interpret the work of Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill, Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, Leonard Cohen, PJ Harvey, Neko Case, Dolly Parton, Morrissey and others.

An artistic force, Faithfull reinvented her musical style with each passing decade, eagerly embracing contemporary sounds and collaborators as engines for her distinctive alto, one that grew more menacing the older she got.

She was a soprano when she met her future boyfriend Jagger at a party in London also attended by Richards, Paul McCartney and Peter Asher. Scouted by Rolling Stones producer Andrew Loog Oldham, Faithfull was in the recording studio with him, Jagger and Richards a few weeks later.

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A regular in London’s gossip press of the 1960s, Faithfull was soon at the center of the thriving music and fashion scenes. She sang backing vocals on the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” and hung with Bob Dylan during his historic 1965 run of shows in England. In 1967, Faithfull was famously photographed draped in a fur rug during a drug bust at Richards’ estate.

With sharp wit, keen intellect and disarming beauty, Faithfull accessed rooms where millions of Beatles-loving teens longed to be. She wrote in her autobiography of hanging out with Dylan and the Beatles during their peak success: “Jesus, how could I have ever thought these scared little boys were gods?”

Her lineage may have prepared her for the bohemian life. Faithfull was born Dec. 29, 1946, to a mother, Eva, who was a baroness. She descended from a line that included Leopold Baron von Sacher Masoch, who coined the term “masochism” in his erotic book “Venus in Furs.”

Faithfull’s father worked as a spy for British intelligence and was “a truly obsessed eccentric,” she wrote in “Faithfull: An Autobiography.” That ran in the family too. Her paternal grandfather, a sexologist, invented a device called “the frigidity machine,” designed to “unlock the primal libidinal energy” and cure the world’s ills.

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After the success of “As Tears Go By” (the Rolling Stones recorded their version a year later), Faithfull continued her recording career and, until 1970, her relationship with Jagger. She characterized those years in her autobiography as: “Desultory intellectual chitchat, drugs, hip aristocrats, languid dilettantes and high naughtiness. I knew I was on my path!”

Most traveled during the 1970s was the path that led to drugs. She described her years homeless and strung out succinctly: “I took the train to London and didn’t return home for years, except for the occasional bath,” she wrote. Anonymous and penniless, she didn’t have a phone or an address. “I was incredibly frail. I never ate. I lost my looks.”

Absent a record contract or musical support, she only made the news as the junkie ex-girlfriend or disgraced aristocrat.

Faithfull got clean in the mid-1970s and returned to upend expectations in 1979 with “Broken English.” Her voice lower from damaged vocal cords, too many cigarettes and other addictions, the album arrived shortly after the British punk explosion, but it wasn’t a punk album per se. It was just hard, unflinching, vulgar, honest.

In addition to the title track, Faithfull transformed John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” into a feminist anthem and drew wide-eyed attention for “Why’d You Do It,” a harsh, profanity-laden indictment directed at an unfaithful lover. The album earned Faithfull her only Grammy nomination, for female rock vocal performance.

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“The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” from “Broken English,” scored a memorable midnight drive through the desert in the 1991 movie “Thelma and Louise.” Rolling westbound, Susan Sarandon’s Louise plays the Shel Silverstein-penned song on the car stereo, and Faithfull sings of a desperate woman who, at the age of 37, realizes “she’d never ride / through Paris in a sports car/ with the warm wind in her hair” and decides to change the plot.

Though she never earned chart success in the United States, Faithfull was a critics’ darling throughout her career. Her 1987 album, “Strange Weather,” saw her interpreting Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” Leadbelly’s “I Ain’t Goin’ Down to the Well No More” and Dr. John’s “Hello Stranger.”

“Faithfull: An Autobiography” was published in 1994. The first of three memoirs, it recounts her trysts and escapades with humor, brashness and power, and remains an essential music memoir. She issued studio albums at an even pace across the last 25 years of her life, one every few years with a new round of songs and a voice just a little more ragged.

Courtney Love sits next to Marianne Faithfull on a sofa

Rock legends Marianne Faithfull, right, with Courtney Love in London in 2021.

(Matthew Lloyd / For The Times)

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For her 2008 album, “Easy Come, Easy Go,” Faithfull covered songs by Judee Sill, Randy Newman, Brian Eno and Merle Haggard. Her rendition of Morrissey’s “Dear God, Please Help Me” hits its climax when Faithfull bellows at full volume, “There are explosive kegs / Between my legs / Dear God, please help me.”

The musician had a long, successful career as an actor as well. She performed Chekhov at the Royal Court Theatre, Shakespeare at the Roundhouse and Brecht and Weill at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.

Most famously, Faithfull starred in “The Girl on the Motorcycle,” a sexually charged, LSD-inspired 1968 love story that became one of the first films to be given an X rating by the Motion Picture Assn. of America. She appeared as a vision in “Lucifer Rising,” a notorious 1972 cult film by Kenneth Anger, an experimental filmmaker in Los Angeles. In 2001, Faithfull played God in a memorable series of dream sequences in the British comedy “Absolutely Fabulous” (her longtime best friend, Anita Pallenberg, played the devil).

Faithfull was nominated as best actress at the 2007 European Film Awards for her role in “Irina Palm,” in which she stars as a grandmother who performs anonymous sexual favors to earn money for her grandson’s cancer treatment. In 2011, Faithfull was awarded Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of France’s most esteemed cultural honors.

Her 2018 album, “Negative Capability” was typically adventurous. Teaming in a studio and living space with longtime Nick Cave collaborator Warren Ellis, the album saw her write songs with artists including Cave, Ellis, British songwriter Ed Harcourt and producer Rob Ellis. She told the Guardian that it was “the most honest record I’ve ever made. There are no hidden corners.”

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She added, “What a joy, hanging out with those wonderful men.” That, of course, was a setting in which she often found herself, whether she invited it or not.

“My main priority in my head was always my work. But then, of course, the men came,” she explained, “and it wasn’t really what I wanted, but I was too pretty to be left alone.”

In 2021, she released “She Walks in Beauty,” a haunting spoken-word recording of Lord Byron and other British Romantic poets, the backing music — ambient at times — provided by Ellis, Eno, Cave and Vincent Segal. It was her 21st and final album

In her final years Faithfull, who was married three times, had her share of challenges. She broke her back in a fall in 2013 and a year later broke her hip. She was hospitalized for three weeks during the early days of the pandemic in 2020 when she tested positive for COVID 19.

Faithfull is survived by a son, financial writer Nicholas Dunbar, and three grandchildren.

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Movie Reviews

The Monkey Has Good Kills, But No Soul

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The Monkey Has Good Kills, But No Soul

In adapting a Stephen King short story, director-writer Osgood Perkins clearly delights in crafting explosive, gory kills meant to spark a laugh more than terrify. Over the course of the film’s hour and 38 minutes, Perkins’s thinly drawn characters are set aflame, their heads are turned to vague viscera by bowling balls or made jelly by wild trampling horses, there is splatter from unforeseen shotgun wounds and unspooled intestines pulled taught by surprise harpoons to the gut. Each event is a freak accident that harkens to Final Destination-level hijinks but aims for more black comedy. It’s the kind of movie primed for midnight screenings. It is less intrigued with the moral portent of its characters’ dilemmas than it is interested in snickering at their fate, giving the film a vaguely nihilistic air. Of course, all machinations are born of a cursed monkey toy that proves impossible to get rid of, whether hacked to pieces or thrown down a well. The harsh, circus twang of the music that plays as it bangs gravely on a drum, teeth bared in a grimace below its depthless eyes, rattles more in the way of annoyance than fear.

Even with its inventive kills and tight runtime, I found myself jotting down notes to myself as I watched: Can this movie end? I just don’t care. The problem is that The Monkey has a hole at its center. It isn’t comedic enough to distract from the fact that the film traffics in rote archetypes, and it doesn’t quite pluck the heartstrings of its audience over the ragged inheritance from fathers to their sons either. The Monkey begins its jaundiced tale on the adolescence of twin brothers, Hal and Bill (Christian Convery), who are a study in contrasts. Hal, the true protagonist, is a wilting flower — easily bruised and endlessly bullied, especially by Bill. Bill mistakes smarm for charm, curses wildly, and treats Hal like a punching bag, seemingly convinced the difference in their birth order is marked by years not minutes. Their mother, Lois (Tatiana Maslany), does her best taking care of them, even as she reels from the unexplained disappearance of her pilot husband Petey (played by Adam Scott, who appears once in the memorable opening scene). Their father couldn’t get rid of the monkey, and so too are the sons beleaguered by it when they find it in a prim, robin’s egg blue hatbox in his room. Life quickly unravels from there as strange deaths in their small town pile up. The boys eventually pack up, move to Maine with their Aunt Ida (Sara Levy) and Uncle Chip (Perkins in dirtbag uncle mode and having fun with it), and throw the monkey down the aforementioned well.

Twenty-five years and a few more deaths later, the monkey seems dormant. Bill and Hal have become men, but haven’t quite grown up. They’re now played by Theo James, whose good looks could make-up for both twins’ deficient personalities. Bill’s smarm has calcified into a kind of mad obsession; Hal is a starkly lonely and cowardly man. Carrying along the thread of inheritance, Hal is a father to teenager Petey (Colin O’Brien), whom he contacts only once a year for fear that associating with him places a target on anyone’s back — the monkey pointing dead center. Hal’s lack of involvement has inspired his ex-wife’s new partner, played by a preening Elijah Wood in the film’s most successful comedic scene, to outright adopt Petey, potentially severing Hal’s pretense of care if it goes through. Familial strife is the film’s backbone, but what a poor and broken backbone it is.

Horror films primed on increasingly gory demises have always trafficked in archetypes. The dumb blonde. The head cheerleader. The gruff jock. These can operate as a crucial shorthand within the world of the film, but for the deaths to really hit with a gut-punch force, you have to feel something for the people — whether it’s hope that a beloved character survives or eagerness to witness a grating character perish. The Monkey has none of that pull. These aren’t characters or even archetypes but the bare sketches of human beings. No one in the film even seems that ruffled from the losses they endure, save perhaps for the brothers. But their storyline mostly brings to mind the fact that Maslany is too good an actor to be playing roles like this.

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The Monkey continues Perkins’ brand of glossy, inert horror with the kind of cinematography and blocking that calls the wrong kind of attention to itself. Longlegs is more offensive in that regard because it took itself so damn seriously despite exploring nothing of merit with any panache. It was a stellar marketing campaign in search of a better film. But with this movie, Perkins tries to infuse a comedic edge to his work that indeed offers some manner of levity — whether it’s an inexperienced priest bumbling through a somber sermon or the grim breakdown of a realtor fluttering through a description of all the recent death in town. If anything, I wanted that humor to be punchier, more brutal. Instead, there are just more gruesome deaths, growing exceedingly ridiculous as the story continues. But a horror film can’t survive on kills alone, and the narrative of The Monkey — for all the movie’s craft and pedigree — is the worst thing a horror saga can be: boring.

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Hunter Schafer reveals new passport misgenders her: Trump's anti-trans orders 'not just talk'

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Hunter Schafer reveals new passport misgenders her: Trump's anti-trans orders 'not just talk'

For “Euphoria” star Hunter Schafer, the Trump administration and its rollout of anti-transgender executive orders now has her mulling the possibility of “having to out myself to Border Patrol agents” as she revealed her new passport misgenders her.

In a TikTok video shared Thursday, the 26-year-old “Cuckoo” and “Kinds of Kindness” actor showed off her new booklet, which incorrectly identifies her as male.

“I filled everything out just like I normally would. I put female,” she explained, “and when it was picked up today and I opened it up, they had changed the marker to male.”

Schafer, who is openly transgender, attributed the discrepancy to the Trump administration’s efforts to implement anti-transgender policies and roll back protections for the LGBTQ+ community. Within his first week back in office, President Trump signed executive orders declaring that the U.S. government recognizes only two sexes that are “not changeable.” As part of the orders, government-issued identifications, including passports and visas, must reflect a person’s sex at birth.

In her video, Schafer said she first dismissed Trump’s orders, saying, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” She first changed her gender marker to female a decade ago, she said, and her forms of ID have reflected that ever since. She had sought to replace her temporary booklet, which she received after losing her old passport last year while filming in Barcelona.

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Now, she says it’s important to acknowledge that Trump’s policies are “actually happening.” Schafer said she was “shocked” upon receiving her new passport this week and acknowledged that her celebrity status doesn’t insulate her from transphobic policies.

“I do believe it is a direct result of the administration our country is currently operating under,” the model-actor continued. “I guess I’m just sort of scared of the way this stuff like slowly gets implemented.”

In his first month in office, Trump has also signed executive orders seeking to restrict gender-affirming care for LGBTQ+ youth and ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports. Schafer said in her video the administration’s attack on transgender people and their identities is “not just talk, that this is real and it’s happening and no one … is excluded.”

Ultimately, Schafer said she could not care less about the incorrect gender on her passport — “It doesn’t change anything about me or my transness.” Despite the difficulties that might come with explaining her gender to government officials, Schafer said, “Trans people are beautiful” and “We are never going to stop existing.”

“I’m never going to stop being trans,” she said. “A letter and a passport can’t change that, and f— this administration.”

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‘Mother’s Baby’ Review: Marie Leuenberger Is a Powerhouse in a Gripping Maternity Drama That Entertains Even as It Goes Off the Rails

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‘Mother’s Baby’ Review: Marie Leuenberger Is a Powerhouse in a Gripping Maternity Drama That Entertains Even as It Goes Off the Rails

What’s with all the maternity angst lately? First came Nightbitch, then If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and now — in keeping with the rule that three makes it a trend — please welcome Mother’s Baby. Led by a fiercely compelling performance from Marie Leuenberger, Johanna Moder’s psychological thriller ticks along with exceptional confidence while it maintains ambiguity as to whether post-partum depression is feeding Julia’s paranoia or there really is something unsettling about her infant son, making her suspect a switcheroo at the private fertility clinic where she gave birth. It’s when the script starts providing answers that things get shaky.

Part of the issue is that the movie often seems to be itching to make a decisive turn into horror but keeps holding back. Moder and co-writer Arne Kohlweyer commit to that shift so late in the action that it all becomes a bit, well, silly. The bizarro outcome might also have packed greater shock value if it hadn’t been so plainly telegraphed at various points. That said, Mother’s Baby is juicy, disturbing and slashed with dark humor. It had me gripped for the duration, even at its loopiest.

Mother’s Baby

The Bottom Line

Less creepy than Rosemary’s, but just a fraction.

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Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Marie Leuenberger, Hans Löw, Claes Bang, Julia Franz Richter
Director: Johanna Moder
Screenwriters: Johanna Moder, Arne Kohlweyer

1 hour 47 minutes

Alongside Leuenberger’s tightly wound turn as accomplished classical orchestra conductor Julia — think Lydia Tár with a baby bump — the movie makes wonderful use of Claes Bang as Dr. Vilfort, head of the swanky but secretive Lumen Vitae clinic.

When the medic greets Julia and her husband Georg (Hans Löw), he’s all smooth reassurances, explaining that the facility uses all the latest research and has the highest success rate. He’s also convinced that just one treatment will make Julia pregnant, even though the couple has clearly tried many other options before shelling out the big bucks for Lumen Vitae.

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With subtle intonations and the tiniest flickers of his facial expressions, Bang lets us know that Dr. Vilfort isn’t quite the nurturing miracle-worker he appears to be with his soft-spoken manner and crisp white lab coat. Creepy pets in movies are generally a red flag, and the doc has an office aquarium with an axolotl, a cannibalistic Mexican salamander with the ability to regenerate lost limbs. In terms of cuteness, it’s the hairless cat of the amphibian world, and if you’re thinking stem cells, you could be getting warm.

Just as predicted, Julia gets pregnant on the first try and all goes smoothly through the gestation period. Not so much when she goes into labor. In one of the most intense childbirth scenes in recent memory — squeamish mothers should approach with caution — Julia becomes increasingly panicked as the nurses keep multiplying, hurriedly implementing changes to the procedure. Robert Oberrainer’s camera slowly circles the delivery table throughout, adding to the sense that something is going very wrong.

When the baby boy does finally appear, he doesn’t make a sound and is whisked out of the room with the utmost urgency by Dr. Vilfort and midwife Gerlinde (Julia Franz Richter), before Julia even gets to see or hold him. The badly shaken new parents are told nothing for what seems like hours, until Vilfort appears to tell them the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck, and due to an oxygen deficiency, the infant was taken to the general hospital’s neonatal ward. He assures them everything will be OK.

But when Vilfort returns the following day with their child, Julia remains distressed, eyeing the baby suspiciously as her agitation escalates into a full-blown anxiety attack. She has trouble breast-feeding at first, which prompts Gerlinde to advise switching to formula, going against the usual breast-is-best counsel of midwives. The fact that Julia keeps referring to the baby as “it” seems a good indication that maternal bonding won’t happen overnight.

When Julia and Georg get their son home, Moder begins to have some insidious fun with the scenario. Julia is not ready to commit to a name, so they give their son the “working title” Adrian, which horror connoisseurs will recall is the name given to the Mia Farrow character’s offspring in a certain Polanski film.

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This Adrian might not be Antichrist material, but he doesn’t seem normal either, sleeping through maximum-volume noise, staring blankly ahead with eyes that seem to register nothing, and almost never crying, even when Julia gets caught up in her preparation for a Schubert concert and forgets to feed him for a whole day.

Leuenberger — who looks at times uncannily like Kathryn Hahn — is superb in these fraught scenes, leaning into unhinged behavior without ever making us question Julia’s rationality. There’s something shockingly funny about a mother giving a sudden full-fist squeeze to a squeaky toy right next to a baby’s ear just to get a reaction.

When she starts sawing vigorously away on a violin or pumping the stereo volume to thunderous levels on Sturm und Drang classical pieces, Georg begins to doubt her stability. “You wanted a child,” he shouts at her. “Yes, but not this one,” she replies. The script also touches on the identity loss that can accompany motherhood by having Julia fly into a rage after changes are made to the orchestra season program without consulting her.

Julia’s apprehension, which Leuenberger steadily builds to a cymbal-clash crescendo, isn’t helped by unsolicited visits from Gerlinde, who seems much more attached to Adrian than his mother. When the midwife cautions Julia that it’s unsafe to leave the baby unattended on a changing table, you can bet there’s going to an alarming fall. Gerlinde brings a gift from the doctor of a fishtank with an axolotl, which irks Julia but clearly seems adorable enough to Georg to make him pick up a companion for it. Bad idea.

As friction between Julia and Georg reaches a peak, he leaves with the baby to stay with his mother so that his wife can rest and get back to normal. But Julia’s fight to uncover the truth just becomes more and more desperate once she starts hearing vague reports of other mothers’ negative experiences at Lumen Vitae. Not to mention being told at the neonatal ward that there’s no record of her child’s birth.

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In one of the most chilling scenes, Julia is taken to see Dr. Vilfort after being stopped from entering the clinic’s medical labs. He keeps a calm smile on his face and a measured tone of voice as he talks her through the potential custody issues and the ruin of her career that would likely result from an insanity diagnosis.

To Moder and Kohlweyer’s credit, there are valid points being made here about the frequent dismissal of women’s fears as mental health problems. But the progression from psychodrama to grotesque motherhood nightmare is too abrupt to be entirely convincing, even if it delivers a generous serve of lurid pleasures. Whether Julia’s freakish discoveries are real or in her mind, the movie could have benefited from being let off the leash earlier.

Still, even if it sits somewhat awkwardly between serious drama and horror, there’s plenty to enjoy here, from the terrific performances to the fiery use of music to Oberrainer’s razor-sharp widescreen images, which turn murkier and more overtly sinister in the purple-tinged final act.

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