Faces of the week

Our regular look at some of the faces which have made the news this week. Above are Marianne Faithfull (main picture), with Conrad Black, Julien Macdonald, Naomi Campbell and Terry Waite.

MARIANNE FAITHFULL

Marianne Faithfull is set to take another step in her climb back from the brink of self-destruction by appearing in a London stage play for the first time in 30 years.

She will play Pegleg, the satanic lead in William Burroughs' fable, The Black Rider, which receives its English premiere at the Barbican Theatre in May.

"I've had all sorts of nonsense offers in recent years - they wanted me to be in The Graduate," she says. "But this play is exactly me."

After all, she was once publicly criticised by the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury. But Faithfull, now 57, has long since exorcised the worst devil in her life, heroin, and is no longer the high-risk investment she was in the 60s and 70s.

People only know my name - they don't know what I do Marianne Faithfull bewails her media image

Then, her audition for one role ended abruptly when she "passed out cold", and at her lowest point she spent two years, homeless, on the streets of Soho.

"By becoming a drug addict you damn yourself immediately as a whore or a slut and a bad person," she says.

Fate seems to have dealt Faithfull some strange hands. Her mother was an Austrian baroness, a descendant of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose novel, Venus in Furs, was the source of the term "masochism".

At 17, Faithfull was applying to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Royal Academy of Music. But then the Rolling Stones entered her life.

She was at a party with her boyfriend, John Dunbar, shortly to become the first of her three husbands and the father of her son, Nicholas, when the Stones' manager, Andrew Oldham, "looked across the room and saw an angel, with big tits".

She dated both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote As Tears Go By for the blonde with the doe eyes and full lips, "and the next thing I'm on tour with the Hollies and Freddie and the Dreamers. I hadn't made a life choice, but I got hooked."

A mother at 18, she rejected the advances of Bob Dylan, but not Mick Jagger. And in 1967, partying with Jagger at Richards' house, Faithfull was found to be naked under a bearskin rug - a Venus in Furs.

But then, being cast in the past has always been a millstone around her neck.

Dark arts

There has rarely been a franker autobiography than hers - how she really loved Keith, her lesbian encounters, losing Jagger's baby, her days in a drug and drink-induced coma in a Sydney hospital, how a lover and fellow addict at a Minneapolis clinic leapt from a 36th storey window.

You damn yourself immediately as a whore or a slut and a bad person Faithfull on drug addiction

But "the hardest thing was that nobody would have asked me to do this book if I hadn't had these relationships with Mick and Keith. People only know my name. They don't know what I do."

In 1979 she earned respect in the music industry for the first time with a comeback album of her own songs, Broken English. The tiny, plaintive soprano voice had gone, to be replaced by a husky contralto.

And, like a damaged Dietrich, Faithfull's world-weary voice opened up the sombre cabaret of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, both on stage and with her album, The Seven Deadly Sins.

Faithfull once played Ophelia in Hamlet with Anthony Hopkins and Nicol Williamson.

Now a grandmother and on good terms with the son she abandoned when he was small, she has the chance to resurrect her acting career and complete another stage in her long quest to forge an identity in the present, rather than the past.

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CONRAD BLACK A court hearing in Delaware that could decide the future of the Daily Telegraph was told that the press baron behind the paper, Lord Black, had employed brutal tactics to try to get his way. He was alleged to have tried to intimidate members of a special committee investigating his financial affairs by warning he would attempt to seize their homes in a defamation lawsuit. Hollinger International claims that Lord Black acted improperly in trying to sell off Telegraph title to the Barclay brothers. Full story

JULIEN MacDONALD Givenchy's head designer Julien Macdonald again proved one of the biggest draws at London Fashion Week, but warned that he might switch his next collection to Milan. His latest show was all about luxury - "it's Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren in their heyday" - with spangly, crystal dresses and £10m worth of diamonds. His British fans include Joely Richardson and Victoria Beckham, but insiders say Givenchy won't renew his contract in April.

NAOMI CAMPBELL Naomi Campbell made an unexpected appearance at the House of Lords at the hearing of the supermodel's case against the Daily Mirror over a report it published about her drug addiction. Dressed in a pale turquoise trouser suit, she heard her counsel argue that the Mirror had infringed her rights by disclosing that she had been attending meetings of Narcotics Anonymous. Meanwhile, the paper's lawyers suggested Campbell was "manipulative and selective" with the truth. Full story

TERRY WAITE Terry Waite went back to Beirut for the first time since he was freed in 1991 after spending five years as a hostage, chained to a wall in a tiny cell by his Islamic extremist captors. Despite the beatings and mock executions he endured in his long ordeal, Waite, 65, said he didn't "look back in anger". He's on a humanitarian mission as president of Y Care International, an overseas arm of the YMCA. Full story