Singer-songwriter, actress and pop culture icon Madonna was BOTD in 1958. Born Madonna Ciccone and raised in Bay City, Michigan to an Italian-American family, her mother died of cancer when she was five. She studied dance at the University of Michigan before moving to New York to work with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. She transitioned into pop music, fronting a series of rock bands before being signed by producer Seymour Stein in 1982. Her self-titled debut album, released in 1983, became an international success, spawning the hit singles Holiday and Lucky Star. She became a global celebrity with her 1984 album Like a Virgin, reaching No 1 on the US Billboard 200 and becoming the first American female pop artist to sell over five million albums. Realising her limitations as a singer, she shrewdly exploited the power of music videos to boost her popular appeal. Her 1985 video for Material Girl, a homage to Marilyn Monroe‘s song-and-dance sequence in the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, established her as a pop culture magpie with ambitions to reach Monroe’s iconic status. Her casting as a self-obsessed hipster in the comedy film Desperately Seeking Susan also helped bolster her public profile. Her 1986 album True Blue, inspired by her recent marriage to actor Sean Penn and with cover photography by Herb Ritts, became her highest-selling studio album, topping charts in 28 countries. Less successful were her forays into acting, with calamitous performances in the films Shanghai Surprise and Who’s That Girl. She ended the decade with the critically-praised album Like a Prayer, igniting controversy with a sex-and-Jesus drenched music video for the title track, earning condemnation from the Vatican. Her status as a sexual provocateur continued with the 1990 Blond Ambition Tour, an elaborately choreographed bacchanalia in which she simulated sex and masturbation on stage, wearing a now-iconic conical brassiere designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier. A fly-on-the-wall documentary of the tour, released as the film In Bed With Madonna (retitled Truth or Dare for US audiences), recorded her transactional relationships with actors Warren Beatty and Sandra Bernhard, an unsuccessful attempt to seduce Antonio Banderas and her well-practised demonstration of fellatio on a Coke bottle. Her 1990 single Justify My Love, with a titillating music video featuring sado-masochism, bondage and lesbianism, was banned by MTV. Later that year, she had a genuine hit with the dance track Vogue, a lyrical homage to Old Hollywood with a music video appropriating dance moves from the Black and trans drag balls of Harlem. In 1992, she became head of Time Warner subsidiary Maverick, allowing her unprecedented creative and financial control over her career. The following year, she released the album Erotica, featuring another sexually provocative music video for its title track. Later that year, she ignited further controversy with her coffee table book SEX, featuring Steven Meisel‘s tastefully X-rated photographs of Madonna and celebrity friends Tony Ward, Ingrid Casares, Vanilla Ice, Isabella Rossellini, Helmut Berger and Udo Kier. Her casting as Eva Perón in the 1996 film of the musical Evita prompted a storm of outrage from Argentineans, though her performance as an ambitious singer-actress who manipulates her image to find fame won her a Golden Globe Award. After having a daughter with her personal trainer Carlos Leon, she re-emerged in 1998 with her hit album Ray of Light, reinventing herself as a Kabbalah-quoting Earth Mother and yoga aficionado. Critically praised, the album won Madonna her first musical Grammy Award, including best album and best record. In the 2000s, she married English filmmaker Guy Ritchie, with whom she had a son, moving to England, affecting British accent and becoming known as “Madge”, while releasing the hit albums Music and Confessions on a Dance Floor. She and Ritchie collaborated on the 2002 dramedy Swept Away, which was universally trashed, eventually separating by the end of the decade. Perhaps unwisely, she co-wrote and directed W.E., a biopic of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, released to withering reviews in 2011. Throughout the 2010s, she became involved in charity work in East Africa, adopting a menagerie of orphans in what appears to have been a cash-for-kids arrangement with the Malawian government. One of the most successful pop stars of all time, her career has been emulated by generations of younger performers, notably Britney Spears and Lady Gaga. She remains a controversial figure, praised by academic Camille Paglia for re-introducing sex and androgyny into pop culture, and condemned by others as a mercenary who repackaged Black and queer avant-garde culture for white mainstream audiences. (Among her many critics, Fran Lebowitz famously commented that her albums should come with a nutritional warning label that reads “Talent Free.”) Her reputation was badly damaged by her brother Christopher’s 2008 memoir Life With My Sister Madonna, portraying her as a manipulative control freak and compulsive liar. In addition to her marriages and boyfriends, she was also a 1990s lesbian, having high-profile affairs with Bernhard, Casares and model Jenny Shimizu, adding to her appeal as a queer icon. Her most recent studio album, Madame X, was released in 2019, followed by the remix compilation Veronica Electronica in 2025. Her next project will be a self-scripted and directed biopic based on her early career, with Julia Garner set to star. She is currently in a relationship with Jamaican football player Akeem Morris, who is 38 years her junior.