In new docu-drama Broken English, the much misunderstood singer looks back at all her past selves – and gives a performance that moves her audience to tears. Its makers relive an extraordinary shoot
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hen Marianne Faithfull died early in 2025, at the age of 78, she left the world one final musical performance. It comes at the end of a new film, Broken English, celebrating her six-decade career. It is a deeply moving scene, almost guaranteed to leave you in tears. You don’t need to be a full-on fan, up to that point, to have relished Faithfull’s unvarnished takes on her astonishing life – but that final husky-voiced number, with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis accompanying, should clinch it.
How do you make a film about Faithfull without rolling out all the cringey 1960s rock mythology? Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard seem to have nailed it. The film-makers initially had just three days with Faithfull, on a set at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire. She was living in a care home and needed oxygen intermittently, meaning the pair had to work quickly. “She was so ill when we first met her,” says Pollard.
Their urgency to correct the record on an often misrepresented artist is reflected in the fictional setting for their film: a gloriously analogue organisation – all whirring tapes and clunking buttons – called The Ministry of Not Forgetting. Tilda Swinton plays its leader, overseeing a research team hellbent on logging all of Faithfull’s output, from playing Ophelia in Tony Richardson’s film of Hamlet, to teaching lyric-writing at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and her song Sister Morphine being pulled from the shelves.
