There was never any question that Marianne Faithfull was going to be a major celebrity. That was a view I shared with all my friends, back in the early 1960s, when I was at school at Leighton Park, Reading, and Marianne was a schoolgirl at St Joseph’s convent school down the road.
She was one of the reasons so many of us wanted to join the town’s Progress theatre, or act in our school plays and operas, in which she regularly took part – at least until the English master decided she was a disruptive influence. Even then, she was a fine young actor and a fine singer. We assumed she would become a folk star after watching her at Reading Folk Club, singing Spanish Is the Loving Tongue or Stanley and Dora, an anti-monarchist version of Frankie and Johnny that she had apparently learned from her father.
