Marianne Faithfull's not interested in seeing her own incredible life story on screen while she's still around but she has taken the lead in Irina Palm, playing a grandmother selling sex to save her grandson
KEY POINTS:
Giver the recent success of Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones concert movie, Shine A Light, and Todd Haynes' riff on Bob Dylan in I'm Not There, it might seem perfect timing for a tell-all movie on Marianne Faithfull, who personified the swinging sixties and the advent of the rock lifestyle.
Yet the singer and one time girlfriend of Mick Jagger, who made headlines for a series of drug busts and lived on the streets of Soho as a heroin addict for two years, is not having any part of it.
"I'm not dead, I am alive. I can control what happens", the outspoken 61-year-old pronounces in her commanding husky voice as she promotes her first leading role in a movie, Irina Palm. "I have a lot of respect for my friends, for them all."
Peppering her conversation with references to Bob, Mick and Keith, she has a few stories to tell, but considers she told them all in her autobiography and enough is enough. Besides, having spent so much of her early life as a stunningly beautiful muse for men - Jagger and Richards wrote her hit single As Tears Go By when she was only 17, while the Stones' classic Wild Horses is said to be about her break-up with Jagger - she is now far happier living on her own merits.
"I'm really not a nostalgic person," she says. "These people are still my friends and I'm really very lucky. I'm in touch with Keith. Mick called me in hospital when I was having my intervention. I see Anita [Pallenberg], I'm in touch with Yoko. I bump into Yoko in New York. I know Sean. It's not nostalgia; it's right now, right here, it never stops."
She bangs the table with her fist. "I last saw Bob Dylan in Australia in Sydney on the balcony with moonlight over Sydney harbour. It was amazing. We had a wonderful time and talked about music. This really is my life.""
If nothing else her recent brush with breast cancer, which thankfully was caught early, has made her determined to make the most of the time she has left - not that she's going anywhere anytime soon. Last year she toured Europe with a show entitled Songs of Innocence and Experience, and she is keen to make more movies, even if that means, shock horror, doing as she is told.
"When I'm on stage with my band it's me directing; I'm like the story teller, I like songs that tell stories. Working on a film you give up your control, completely. You can't even decide what you're going to eat," she chortles. "I have to go to bed at 9.30 to get up at five - it's quite a challenge. But you know, so what? It's like childbirth. You forget."
It wasn't so much the early rises that Faithfull objected to on her new film but the fact that she had to look like a middle class frump. After all, the Hampstead-raised descendent of Austrian aristocracy (she is the daughter of Eva, the Baroness Erisso, and Major Glynn Faithfull, a WWII British spy) had gone all regal to play Marie Antoinette's mother in Sofia Coppola's film and had been part of Gus Van Sant's hip Marais section of Paris Je t'aime.
In Irina Palm, an unusual tragi-comedy, she's a dowdy grandmother called Maggie who needs money fast so her grandson can have a life-saving operation.
After being told she's useless by anyone who might employ her, she discovers, in a hilarious kind of accident, that she has a great pair of hands for pleasuring men. In apparent Japanese style, the act takes place through a hole in the wall so that her clients aren't aware she is wearing an apron, or reading a magazine.
Faithfull, who was attracted to that twist in the story, had never set foot in a sex shop, even if she had spent those years in Soho, where the film is set.
"That worked for the character; I could use that," she says. "I have had friends who were prostitutes, but we never talked about their work. They didn't really like to talk about it."
Bearing little resemblance to Maggie was part of the idea. "I like doing something that people would not expect but next time I'd like to do something where I look a little more beautiful. That was quite hard. Maggie's got her own kind of beauty hasn't she? But the clothes!"
Immensely attractive with her expressive, animated face, her flock of blonde hair, piercing blue eyes, crushed-velvet jacket and smart jeans, Faithfull today retains traces of the mesmerising beauty of her youth, which sits in direct contrast to Maggie's dull brown hair, fringe and functional clothes. What they have in common is that they are women striking out on their own.
"Yes there's that putting your foot down. What I really like is the journey, that when we meet Maggie she's one person and then we watch her change. But the thing I can personally relate to is her being a mother and a grandmother."
Could she go to such extremes for her grandchild? "I don't know if I'd be able to do that. I'm lucky I don't have to."
There's no doubting that Faithfull's droll sense of humour has helped her see through the tough times. "If you can't laugh at yourself life is unbearable," she says. Ultimately, she found living in the spotlight difficult, and it didn't help that the 1967 drugs bust at Keith Richards' country estate, where she became "the girl in a fur-skin rug", happened at such an early age. In 1969, around the time of her break-up from Jagger, she hit the headlines in her own right, for taking 150 sleeping pills in a Sydney hotel while the Stones were on tour. She now admits that living on the Soho streets was "exactly what I needed at that time. It was complete anonymity. I wanted to disappear and I did."
She has married and divorced three times, and at 18 had a son, Nicholas, by her first husband, John Dunbar, who was awarded custody. She moved to America, then Paris, where she still spends most of her time though she also calls Dublin home. She has been with Frenchman Francois Ravard, who is also her manager, for 15 years. "It took me a while to find the right man," she admits. She dotes on her two grandsons, and remains very close to Nicholas, the editor of a finance magazine.
"With all those busts, the harassment and the perception of me, I had to leave London. I'm not saying I behaved that well, but I didn't do anything that terrible either. I remember it very well - it was when Mrs Thatcher came into government. I put on my telly and in those days there were only two channels and on one channel was the casualty list from the Falklands War and on the other channel the Pope was playing Wembley. I thought, 'Right! It's time I got out of here.'"
How does it feel now to go back?
"I love London. I have forgiven them. It's just typical of me to hold a resentment towards the whole country. For like 20 years. Get over it!"
Faithfull's coming to terms with her life has been gradual. Her 1979 hit song, Broken English, which drew on her early dark years, represented her musical comeback, and she recorded numerous albums in the 80s, while struggling with cocaine and alcohol, which she has now given up.
Maintaining a creative diversity is what keeps her going. She has recorded with young cutting edge musicians like Jarvis Cocker and Beck, and also with Nick Cave, her collaborator on the album, Poison.
"I wrote three of the most beautiful songs I've ever written with Nick. We're very good friends. I love Jarvis too; he's married to a French girl so I see him quite a bit. I don't see much of Beck because he's in America and I don't go there much."
As our interview winds down it's time for the Rolling Stones question. (In her book she wrote that she loved Richards more than Jagger.) So what's the secret to the Stones longevity? "They're really, really good. Go to a Rolling Stones show and you will see why. I haven't been for a while, I must say. But I have seen a lot of Rolling Stones shows," she chuckles, understating the obvious.
After her cancer scare she says she has looked after herself more, rather then being out on the town. "I'm very lucky. I had very good doctors, my partner was wonderful, my friends were really wonderful, my family was great; it all kicks in. But I don't have a financial safety net. I never made a lot of money. It made me realise I've got to start to save for my old age."
While the money earned from last year's tour will help her edge closer to retirement, the tour itself left her exhausted, so that she has taken the rest of this year off. She plans to release a new album and hopes to tour again in 2009. Certainly her spate of bad health has taken the wind out of her sails and left her less rebellious.
"I think everybody mellows with age; I hope I have. I mean, I'm never really going to change that much. I'm never going to become a complete conformist, no."
