Mariah Carey

Birth name: Mariah Carey
Date of birth: 27 March 1970
Place of birth: Long Island, New York
Record labels: CBS/Coumbia/Virgin/Mercury
Career highlights: Five Grammy Awards, Best Selling Female Artist, World Music Awards 2000, and a Recording Star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame Highest charting singles: Without You, number one, 1994, Against All Odds, number one, 2000

Mariah Carey is a record-shattering vocalist, and has topped the US singles chart 16 times – with only Elvis spending longer at the top. She has an elastic talent that moves easily from glossy ballads to hip-hop inspired pop, and insists on writing most of her own material.

Famous for her humble upbringing, and her devotion to R&B and Motown, Mariah was coached as a singer from a young age by her mother, Patricia Hickey, herself a former opera singer.

By the age of 10 she was crafting her own songs, and was known at school as Mirage because she bunked off so much to record demo songs with local musicians!

Surprisingly for some, Mariah is credited with a five-octave vocal range, helping her to hit the highest notes while slipping into breathy whispers in an instant. It is this talent that has allowed her to move from a straight-up ballad singer in the early 90s to a fully-fledged urban pop princess in the new millennium.

Unfortunately her fledgling acting career has not taken off, and her performance in Glitter, a film about her life, received some fiercely bad press.