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

But her battle with cancer, which she was diagnosed with last year, 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 telephone from her home in Paris, Faithfull, who plays the Jubilee Auditorium tomorrow night, references the book and another one she's penning often.

A lot of the facts are there, she says, pointedly intimating 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 such as 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 says 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 ... 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 she can still roll with rock, though fans can expect a more subdued set tomorrow night.

Faithfull confesses to having never really wanted to be a pop singer.

It's only recently she's gotten back to her first love, acting, with roles in four films in the last two years.