Mariah Carey
Name: Mariah Carey
Height: 5' 9''
Sex: F
Nationality: American
Birth Date: March 27, 1970
Birth Place: Huntington, New York, USA
Profession: Actress, Producer, Composer, Director
Education: Oldfield Middle School and Greenlawn's Harborfields High School. Graduated in 1987
Father: Alfred Roy Carey - African-American/Venezuelan; aeronautical engineer; divorced in 1973
Mother: Patricia Hickey - Irish-American; a former opera singer with the New York City Opera and a vocal coach
Sister: Alison (older)
Brother: Morgan (older)
Husband: Tommy Mottola - Sony record executive producer; married on June 5, 1993 and divorced in March 1998
Relationships: Luis Miguel - Puerto Rican; musician and Derek Jeter {New York Yankees' player}
Claim to fame: Album: Mariah Carey {1990}
Mariah Carey (born March 27, 1969) is a Grammy Award-winning American pop and R&B singer, songwriter, record producer, music video director, and actress. In 1988 Carey met Columbia Records executive Tommy Mottola at a party, where Starr gave him Carey's demo tape. Mottola played the tape and was very impressed with what he heard. Carey and Tommy Mottola had become romantically involved during the making of her debut album. In 1990 under the guidance of Columbia Records executive Tommy Mottola she became the first recording act to have its first five singles top the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart. , and in June 1993 they were married. Later, following her marriage to Mottola in 1993, a series of hit records established her position as Columbia's highest-selling act. According to Billboard magazine, she was the most successful artist of the 1990s in the United States.
Carey was born in Huntington, Long Island, New York. She is the third and youngest child of Patricia Hickey, a former opera singer and vocal coach of Irish American extraction, and Alfred Roy Carey (formerly Nunez), an aeronautical engineer of Afro-Venezuelan heritage. Carey's parents took divorce when she was three years old.Carey had little contact with her father, and her mother worked several jobs to support the family. Spending much of her time at home alone, Carey turned to music as an outlet. She began singing at around the age of three. Her mother Patricia was her vocal coach; Patricia began teaching her how to sing after Carey imitated her practicing Verdi's opera Rigoletto in Italian.
She is well-known for her melismatic singing voice, soulful coloratura soprano voice, vocal range, power, and use of whistle register. She is often considered to be one of the greatest vocalists of all time. Some critics have said that Carey's efforts to showcase her vocal talents have been at the expense of communicating true emotion through song. Carey performed for the first time in public during elementary school and was writing her own songs by junior high. Carey graduated from Harborfields High School in Greenlawn, New York amidst her hectic schedules as a demo singer for local recording studios. After moving to New York City, Carey worked numerous part-time jobs to pay the rent and completed five hundred hours of beauty school. Eventually, she became a backup singer for Puerto Rican freestyle singer Brenda K. Starr. Although she had occasionally performed live, stage fright had prevented Carey from embarking on any major tours. She began writing and producing for other artists, such as Penny Ford and Daryl Hall, within the coming year.
Carey also began to take professional acting lessons in 1997 and within a couple of years, she made her debut as an opera singer in the romantic comedy The Bachelor (1999) starring Chris O'Donnell and RenŠ¹e Zellweger, and CNN derisively referred to her casting as a talentless diva as "letter-perfect... the "can't act" part informs Carey's entire performance".
Carey's first starring role was in Glitter (2001), in which she played a struggling musician in the 1980s who breaks into the music industry after meeting a disc jockey (Max Beesley). It was a box office failure. Halliwell's Film Guide called it a "vapid star vehicle for a pop singer with no visible acting ability". The Village Voice observed: "When Carey tries for an emotion — any emotion — she looks as if she's lost her car keys." The film has consistently been ranked as one of the worst of all time in user voting at the Internet Movie Database. While her television work has been limited to a January 2002 episode of Ally McBeal.
Undaunted by the criticism in the press Carey was still into films. She acted in Wise Girls (2002) with Melora Walters and Mira Sorvino. Carey also appeared Death of a Dynasty (2003) and State Property 2 (2005). In 2006 Carey joined the cast of the indie film Tennessee (2007), taking the role of a waitress who travels with her two brothers to find their long-lost father. The movie is expected to come out before the Christmas in 2007.
After receiving Billboard's "Artist of the Decade" Award and the World Music Award for "Best-Selling Female Artist of the Millennium", Carey parted from Columbia and signed a contract with EMI's Virgin Records worth a reported US$80 million. It was widely reported that Carey had suffered a physical and emotional breakdown. and later she had checked into a hospital. Carey said her time at Virgin had been, "a complete and total stress-fest... " I made a total snap decision which was based on money, and I never make decisions based on money. I learned a big lesson from that." To add further to Carey's emotional burdens, her father, with whom she had had little contact since childhood, died of cancer that year. Her publicist announced that she would be taking a break from public appearances.
After a brief respite she bounced back on to the scene and went on to become a hit all through. Carey took much more control over her image and music. In 2000 the World Music Awards named Carey the best-selling female artist of all time, and she has recorded the most U.S. number-one singles for a female solo artist at seventeen. In 2007, Carey will receive a "recording star" on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and be inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame.
