The courtly ways of Marianne Faithfull

Rakewell was, like so many, sad to hear about the death of singer, poet and muse Marianne Faithfull. While her influence on music is widely recognised, there are other aspects of her life and career worth revisiting – her turn as Irina in Chekhov’s Three Sisters next to Glenda Jackson’s Masha, for a start. It is, however, another role that gives Rakewell particular pause for thought. When Sofia Coppola made Marie Antoinette (2006), her luscious macaron-coloured biopic, she knew what she was doing when she cast Faithfull in the impossible role of the empress Maria Theresa.

While the fact that Faithfull was the daughter of a spy and a baroness is well rehearsed, fewer people know that Faithfull, through her maternal grandfather, was a descendant of the Habsburg family. In 2007, Faithfull told, of all places, Saga magazine, ‘I dare say I have traits from both my parents.’ Perhaps Coppola had allowed Faithfull to bring out a Habsburgian side of her personality.

But Faithfull was Habsburgian in more ways than one. In the late 1970s, she became friends with Andy Warhol – the artist described by art historian Robert Rosenblum as the ‘court painter to the 70s’ – and was a fixture at his Factory. Through all these celebrity portraits Warhol became something of a late 20th-century Van Dyck. Yet the Factory wasn’t just serving a court; it was a court itself. As Faithfull told the Guardian in 2002, to get into the Factory ‘you either had to have a lot of dosh, or you had to be funny and charming, or you had to look really good’. She went on: ‘There was definitely an inner circle and, in a way, I was part of it because I was friends with [Warhol’s manager] Freddy Hughes.’ Photographed sitting on a bannister by Robert Mapplethorpe or backstage at a Blondie concert by Warhol himself, Faithfull seems complicit in the construction of her own image. But they also suggest that she understands just what court life was and what she had to give to be part of it. As Maria Theresa says to her daughter Marie Antoinette in Coppola’s film, explaining the importance of court life, ‘You represent the future; all eyes will be on you.’ As well as writing and performing some of the greatest songs of the ’70s and beyond, Faithfull managed to keep all eyes on her and become one of the great figures of her era.