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."

Her slow, haunting voice in her first hit, "As Tears Go By," in 1964 seemed to portend a darker side to the British pop sound that was winning hearts worldwide with the breezy early tunes of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

Faithfull released 21 solo albums, including the critically acclaimed "Broken English" in 1979 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." "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.

Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull was born on December 29, 1946, in London to a British intelligence officer who interrogated prisoners of war. Her mother was closely related to the Austrian aristocracy.

She attended a Roman Catholic convent boarding school from the age of seven but even there she nurtured a rebellious heart.

"Ever since my days at the convent my secret heroes had been decadents, aesthetes, doomed Romantics, mad Bohemians, and opium-eaters," she wrote in her 1994 book "Faithfull: An Autobiography."

Faithfull's formative years were in the swinging London of the mid-1960s when she was a budding folk singer. At 18, she married and had a son but attended a party that changed her life.

There she met Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham who launched her popular music career and brought her into the band's inner circle.

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Faithfull contributed backing vocals to the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine" single and helped inspire the Stones' "Sympathy For The Devil."

As the 1960s ended, Faithfull's life of glamour faded quickly and she spent two years living on the streets of London as an anorexic heroin addict after she and Jagger split in 1970. Among the squalor, she found an upside.

"For me, being a junkie was an admirable life. It was total anonymity, something I hadn't known since I was 17. As a street addict in London, I finally found it. I had no telephone, no address," she wrote in her autobiography.

The experience was grist for the mill for her gritty album "Broken English", which she described as her masterpiece.

Despite the personal cost, including an overdose of sleeping pills in Australia in 1969 that put her in a coma, Faithfull appreciated the chance to learn from great songwriters like Jagger, Paul McCartney and John Lennon.