Heroin. Breast cancer. Mick Jagger. Marianne Faithfull has survived all three.

Faithfull had yet to be diagnosed with cancer when I spoke to her in late 2006, but only a couple weeks later her winter date in Edmonton had been cancelled with the news. The makeup date is tomorrow night at the Winspear Centre. Tickets are $70.60, and $5 from each one sold is fittingly being donated to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation.

A battle with cancer might be enough for Faithfull, who turned 60 late last year, to rationalize an addendum to her eponymously titled biography, which was published in 1994. Over the phone from her home in Paris, she references the book and another one she's penning often. A lot of the facts are there, she says, pointedly intimating that it's best not to ask tired questions about her running afoul of needles and Stones.

The tumult of that era naturally found its way into her songwriting, tackling issues like sexuality and depression that critics have since come to regard as being ahead of its time. Between the comebacks (1979's Broken English, for one) and chemo, highs and lows, Faithfull has become an iconic symbol of pop stardom's struggle against itself and one of the world's most respected female singer-songwriters. She knows her story is a good one which is part of why she tends to protect it so.

"I'm not letting Hollywood get its hand on my story," she states flatly. "There have been lots of offers and I've turned them all down. I'm not letting them do a sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll story on me, which is what they would want."

She says one script she read had her turning tricks as a prostitute to support her heroin habit. "It was disgusting. I told them to f--- off.

"What I didn't know was that when they take an option on a book, they don't take an option on the actual book; they just take the option on the idea and then they can write a script completely out of their own heads."

It's an approach that has ironically worked for Faithfull as an artist, the wild ups and downs of her personal life reflected by a range of sporadic but interesting releases throughout the '80s and '90s. She was paid her due by pop's new guard in 2002 with Kissin' Time, an album which featured collaborations with Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan, Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, Beck and Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz fame.

A Faithfull guffaw at the suggestion she might slow down the pace a bit made it clear that she can still roll with rock, though fans can expect a more subdued set tomorrow night.

With a sigh, Faithfull confesses to having never really wanted to be a pop singer. It's only recently that she's gotten back to her first love, acting, with roles in four films in the last two years. But ultimately becoming a singer, she says, had everything to do with an appetite for success - sort of.

"When I was discovered, I was writing to universities to read English, philosophy and comparative religion," she recalls, referring to a London party where she was spotted by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham.

"I was living with John Dunbar, who became my first husband, who I had a child with, and we never had enough to eat. I was starving! And all I could see was a delicious table full of food ...

"Andrew didn't even talk to me; he talked to John. He went up to John and said, 'Can she sing?' And John said he didn't know, turned and then asked me.

"So, me, with a mouthful of smoked salmon, said, 'Yeah.'"