Marianne Faithfull, singer and Rolling Stones muse, dead at 78

"It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull. Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed," a spokesperson for Faithfull confirmed to Fox News Digital. 

The British pop star and muse inspired and helped write a few of The Rolling Stones' greatest songs. Her breakthrough hit, 1964's "As Tears Go By," was one of the first songs written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

After becoming a heroin addict in the late '60s, she had multiple health issues over the years, including bulimia, breast cancer and emphysema.

However, in 1979, Faithfull revived her music career with the classic album "Broken English."

Her interests extended to theater, film and television. Faithfull began acting in the '60s, including an appearance in Jean-Luc Godard's "Made In U.S.A." and stage roles in "Hamlet" and Chekhov's "Three Sisters." 

She later appeared in such films as "Marie Antoinette" and "The Girl from Nagasaki, and the TV series "Absolutely Fabulous," in which she was cast as - and did not flinch from playing - God.

Her father was a British intelligence officer during World War II who helped save her mother from the Nazis in Vienna.

Through the London art scene, Faithfull met her estranged husband, John Dunbar, who introduced her to Paul McCartney and other celebrities. Dunbar also co-founded the Indica Gallery, where John Lennon would say he met Yoko Ono.

"The threads of a dozen little scenes were invisibly twining together," she wrote in her 1994 memoir. "All these people - gallery owners, photographers, pop stars, aristocrats and assorted talented layabouts more or less invented the scene in London, so I guess I was present at the creation."

Faithfull was known for the track "As Tears Go By," and she only needed two takes to complete the popular song. 

"It's an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of 20 to have written," Faithfull penned in her memoir of Jagger. "A song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life. The uncanny thing is that Mick should have written those words so long before everything happened. It's almost as if our whole relationship was prefigured in that song."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.