Whitney Houston, who was found dead in a Beverly Hills hotel room on Saturday, rose from a gospel church choir in New Jersey to become one of the bestselling and most-admired female singers of all time. With hits like I Will Always Love You — the theme song of what was her film acting debut in The Bodyguard opposite KevinCostner in 1992 — and The Greatest Love of All, Houston won six Grammys and more than 400 other awards in a 25-year career.
Her soaring voice influenced singers ranging from Beyonce and Alicia Keys to Mariah Carey and Celine Dion — and inspired thousands of copycat performers on TV talent shows. Her early successes also made her one of the first black artistes, along with Michael Jackson, to find success on MTV.
She later became the kind of singer and actress who could cross international barriers as well as ethnic ones.
“She had everything, beauty, a magnificent voice. How sad her gifts could not bring her the same happiness they brought us,” singing legend Barbra Streisand said in a statement. Critics hailed the range of her voice and the passion behindher performances.
But behind closed doors, her life was far from the romanticdreams she captured so brilliantly in her singing. She struggled for years with drug and alcohol problems, entering rehab againas recently as May 2011.
And on Saturday, her sudden death shocked the world as much as Jackson’s passing from an overdose of sedatives and a powerful anesthetic in June 2009, at age 50. She joins a shortlist of brilliant singers — Elvis Presley, Amy Winehouse and Jackson — whose lives were cut short by personal problems and drug abuse.
Houston died on the eve of the Grammy Awards, and just hours before she was due to attend the annual pre-Grammy party thrown by record producer Clive Davis — the man who discovered her in a nightclub in the early 1980s and who guided her career through its many ups and downs.
Her death came just over two years after a 2009 come back following the end of a turbulent 14-year marriage to singer Bobby Brown. She is survived by their daughter, Bobbi Kris. Houston brought a painful and public honesty to her personal struggles, admitting in a 2002 TV interview that she had used marijuana, cocaine, alcohol and prescription drugs.
By 2009, as she released her first (and last) studio album in seven years with I Look to You, she told talk show host Oprah Winfrey that her and Brown’s drug of choice was marijuana mixed with cocaine. She also described how when the two were high, he would break glass objects and at one point he painted what she called “evil eyes” on the walls of their home. Her mother forced her into rehab, telling Houston, “I’m not losing you to Satan.”