Born survivor Marianne Faithfull is back with a new film. She tells Alison Jones why she is more innocent than her rock chick image would lead us to believe.

“It is a dirty job but someone has got to do it,” remarks Marianne Faithfull, nutshelling both a scene in her new film Irina Palm and the industry in which her character finds herself, the sex industry.

In the tragi-comedy, which premiered to great acclaim at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, Marianne plays Maggie, a devoted but somewhat unworldly grandmother who resorts to taking a job servicing men to pay for treatment for her sick grandson.

Dowdy and middle aged she is not exactly escort material but when she does a job she does it well and she gains a reputation for being particularly skilled in giving....well, the clue is in the title.

In order to get to grips (so to speak with her new profession) a little training is required and Maggie/Irina’s practice session provide a little welcome levity in a movie which is probably the polar opposite of Pretty Woman.

“We used plastic didoes, totally disgusting but we gritted our teeth and did it, “ says Marianne in her familiar husky growl. She immersed herself in the part, dying her blonde hair brown so she would look like the working class, care worn widow she was trying to portray.

“I have never thought of myself as a sex symbol but as a woman it was hard to let go off my vanity. I am not actually very vain but I am a little bit. It was my idea to dye my hair. It would have been a real mistake for Maggie to be blonde and to be in any way sexy, I just let myself go.

“This is the first time I have had the responsibility of carrying a whole film and I didn’t know whether I could do it. But when I saw it I realised that I could and that there is not one minute which is Marianne Faithfull. I am Maggie.”

One aspect Marianne enjoyed was Maggie’s naivety about this world, something Marianne shared. A surprising admission considering that as a young woman, she and boyfriend Mick Jagger embodied everything that people thought was swinging about the 60s.

Legends have grown about the supposedly hedonistic behaviour of the couple and their friends Anita Pallenberg and Brian Jones, cemented by stories of her being caught by police during a drugs raid at Keith Richard’s house wearing only a fur rug.

“I have never been to a club like (the one Maggie works in),” says Marianne. “I have never even seen a pornographic film, it is just not my world at all and that is something I have in common with her. The first time I went onto the set was the first time I had ever been to a place like that in real life. I was astounded.”

It is the dichotomy of Marianne that in the next breath she talks about the fact that she used to be good friends with prostitutes.

“They are dead now. I met them through drugs. They are always on drugs, it is a tough job. Obviously what they liked about me was that I was nothing to do with it and I wasn’t curious. I can never remember them ever telling me that they were having a good time.

“It was a really tough choice to make. It is usually the classic story. Young girl comes to big city, no money, gets picked up by somebody and put into this life. Then they get used to the money, they need the money and then they get into drugs. It is a nightmare.”

Oddly enough she found that friendships and love still existed even in these direst of circumstances. That though these women has so little self regard they were willing to sell themselves on the streets, they still had the capacity to want to care for and protect others.

Marianne slips into memories of one of the few details her mother Eva – or Baroness Eva Erisso a descendant of the Habsburg Dynasty who was born in Budapest – revealed about her life before the war, when she was a ballerina for the Max Reinhardt Company by day and a cabaret dancer by night.

“She was very young, 17, and beauty like you would not believe. She told me she would be coming back late from the nightclub and she made friends with a prostitute. In those days the prostitutes had glass shoes with red lights in them, so you could see them walking, and there was my mother beside her, little Eva, with her flat shoes that dancers wear when they’re not working.

“She would be on her way back home to some quite cheap digs where she was staying and this woman would say ‘right I will make sure you get home okay’.”

Marianne suspects that her mother probably had more tales from her time as a real life Sally Bowles, but she never revealed them to her only daughter and she confesses “my own wild life broke her heart”.

Perhaps what was hardest for her to bear was that Marianne so completely embraced the middle part of the sex, drugs and rock and roll cliché and there were many times that her habit nearly killed her.

Up until she was a teenager Marianne had led a very sheltered life. Her father Major Robert Glynn Faithfull, a British army officer and spy, had rescued the half Jewish Eva from Nazi controlled Austria and they married after the war. They divorced six years later. Marianne moved with her mother to Reading and attended convent school.

“I think the happiest time of my life was when I was 15, before it all happened when I was really happy with my mum with my school friends, really, really innocent. The naughtiest thing I did was reading Oscar Wilde.

“My best friend was Sally Oldfield, Mike’s sister. It was actually a fantastic education for an autodidact. What we did was look at the Catholic Index (of prohibited books), check out all of them and read them.”

That changed when she was 17 and she started performing folk music in coffee houses before being discovered at a Rolling Stones launch party by music producer Andrew Loog Oldham.

Her first release as Tears Go By which was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. She dismisses the story, tentatively proffered for conformation by one journalist, that Oldham had locked Mick, Keith and Marianne in a kitchen until they came up with the song.

“I was at home with my mother. I was 17,” she says, sounding scandalised. “I was in their heads. They had just met me. I was incredibly pretty...not quite the same now. I believe I was stunning at 17 and I didn’t actually know it.

"Now I know there is nothing more attractive than a very beautiful girl who doesn’t know she is beautiful. It is unbelievable and it doesn’t happen very often.

“Anyway Mick and Keith had seen this incredible little comet flashing past and I was completely different from the girls in their world. I had been brought up by the nuns very well.”

She and Mick remain friends even though their relationship ended in the 1970s. He called her while she recovering in hospital after being diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago.

“He called at 1am in the morning, I thought ‘what?’. I really wasn’t expecting that and I thought that was very, very good form.

“I had a little lump and I went to a really great doctor who is known to be incredible diagnostician and he saw something that somebody else might have missed. It was actually precancerous.

“It has made life a lot more precious, I was very scared. Those of us my age (she is now 61) grew up in a world where if you got cancer that was it, you were finished.”

She once again blesses her good fortune at having cheated death, admitting that after losing most of the 70s to drugs (she started with cocaine in the 60s, then moved onto heroin) and remaining addicted well into the 80s, she had done nothing to help herself.

“I really don’t know why I survived. So many people didn’t and I have been very lucky. It was nothing I did right I can tell you.

“Don’t know where I found the strength from. I don’t think it is me. It is something else. a junkie is not a strong person. I got help.”

At the height of it she lost custody of her son Nicholas, the product of her first marriage to artist John Dunbar and was made homeless, living on the streets in Soho.

Her voice cracked and lowered because of cocaine abuse. That combined with years of smoking and drinking have given it a quality some critics describe as ‘whisky soaked’, making it more suited to jazz, soul and blues.

In the 1980s she broke her jaw for a second time following a fall.

“It started to get infected. I was out of (rehabilitation) treatment, going to meetings and in really bad pain. I thought everyone who didn’t take drugs was in this kind of pain. It was completely bonkers.

“Then finally it hit me that maybe there was something wrong. I went to see a surgeon and had to have a big operation to take out the necrotic matter. I had to have pins in my jaw for three months, I went to a Bob Dylan show looking like a telecaster.”

She continued to write and record, though there were years when her output was fitfull.

There was a triumphant comeback with the critically regarded Broken English in 1979 and she reinvented herself as a jazz blues artist with the album package Strange Weather.

The albums Kissin’ Time (2002) and Before the Poison (2005) feature collaborations with some of the young turks of rock and pop and indie music (including Beck, Jarvis Cocker, PJ Harvey, Nick Cave and Damon Albarn) cementing her reputation as a musical icon cum den mother.

She even helped out Carla Bruni (on the recommendation of their mutual old flame Mick Jagger) with the text on her poetry-based album No Promises, released just before she become a political housewife to French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Her acting career has been a little patchier. She has preferred to take small parts in everything from provocative drama’s like Intimacy to the pop-culture embracing Marie Antoinette. This is a testament more to her lack of confidence than of ability.

“If I hadn’t got discovered at 17 I would have gone to drama school and I would have become an actress,” she says with conviction. “I am very grateful to the other cast members of Irina Palm, they didn’t make me feel underneath.

“I think like that. I think they are real actors and I am actually a pretend actress. That isn’t really true though. I played Irena when I was 19 at the Royal Court Theatre, I played Ophelia for Tony Richardson. I have done some good work but very little and very long spaced.

“I think I would be great Bond villain, the Lotte Lenya role (the stiletto-toed killer in From Russia with Love). A villain would be fantastic especially if it was a bit funny.

“And I would have a heart attack to be working with Judi Dench (M in the spy series). when I was 15, my first school trip to Stratford was to see Judi. I would kill to work with people like her and Vanessa Redgrave.

“I do get offered a lot of rubbish and I turn it down. I haven’t worked this hard to make this career and come this far to blow it on degrading bullshit.”

* Irina Palm is at Warwick Arts Centre from July 11 to 14.