director	Andrew AdamsonKelly AsburyConrad Vernon
producer	Aron WarnerJohn H. WilliamsDavid Lipman
story	Andrew AdamsonWilliam Steig
screenplay	Andrew AdamsonJoe StillmanJ. David StemDavid N. Weiss
narrator	Rupert Everett
starring	Mike MyersEddie MurphyCameron DiazAntonio BanderasJulie AndrewsJohn CleeseRupert EverettJennifer Saunders
music	Harry Gregson-Williams
editing	Michael AndrewsSim Evan-Jones
studio	DreamWorks AnimationPacific Data Images
distributor	DreamWorks Pictures (through Universal Pictures)
released
runtime	93 minutes
country
language	English
budget	$150 million
gross	$919,838,758 }}

''Shrek 2'' is a 2004 American computer-animated fantasy comedy film, produced by DreamWorks Animation and directed by Andrew Adamson, Kelly Asbury and Conrad Vernon. It is the second installment in the ''Shrek'' film series and the sequel to 2001's ''Shrek''. The film features the voices of Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, Antonio Banderas, Julie Andrews, John Cleese, Rupert Everett and Jennifer Saunders.

Like its predecessor,'' Shrek 2'' received positive reviews. ''Shrek 2'' scored the second-largest three day opening weekend in US history at the time of release, as well as the largest opening for an animated film until May 18, 2007, when it was eclipsed by its sequel ''Shrek the Third.'' As of 2011, it is the inflation-adjusted 31st highest-grossing film of all time in the US. It went on to be the highest-grossing film of 2004. The associated soundtrack reached the top ten of the ''Billboard'' 200. It is also the seventh highest ticket selling animated film of all time. It is DreamWorks's most successful film to date and was also the highest-grossing fully animated film of all time worldwide for six years until ''Toy Story 3'' surpassed it in 2010.

Plot

When Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers) and Fiona (voiced by Cameron Diaz) come back from their honeymoon, they find an invitation to a royal ball with Fiona's parents to celebrate their marriage, an event Shrek is reluctant to participate in. Fiona talks him into it, and along with Donkey (voiced by Eddie Murphy), they travel to the kingdom of Far Far Away. They meet Fiona's parents, King Harold and Queen Lillian (voiced by John Cleese and Julie Andrews), who are surprised and repulsed by Fiona's choice of husband (particularly the King himself), since they had arranged that Prince Charming rescue her from the castle but now they see that her husband is an ogre, and she herself has the likeness of an ogre.

At a shared meal, Shrek and Harold get into a heated argument over how Shrek and Fiona will raise their family, and Fiona, disgusted at Shrek and her father's behavior, locks herself away in her room that evening, where she meets her Fairy Godmother (voiced by Jennifer Saunders), who is also surprised at Fiona's new looks. Shrek worries that he has lost his true love, particularly after finding the diary from her teenhood and reading that she was once infatuated with Prince Charming (voiced by Rupert Everett).

King Harold is accosted by the Fairy Godmother and Charming, her son. The two retell the Prince's adventures and how he overcame many obstacles and climbed a high tower in order to rescue Fiona, finding instead a cross-dressing wolf. They reprimand Harold for breaking an old promise that Charming would be able to marry Fiona and demand that he find a way to get rid of Shrek. After Shrek reads Fiona's diary and pages containing the single phrase "Mrs. Fiona Charming", Harold arranges for Shrek and Donkey to join him on a fictitious hunting trip, which really is a trap to lure the two into the hands of an assassin, Puss in Boots (voiced by Antonio Banderas).

When Fiona realizes that Shrek left, she asks her father for help, but he replies that he always wanted the best for her and that she should think about what is the best for her, too. Puss is unable to defeat Shrek and, revealing that he was paid by Harold, asks to come along as a way to make amends. Shrek decides to go to the Fairy Godmother for help. However, the Fairy Godmother states that ogres do not live "happily ever after." Nonetheless, the three sneak into the Fairy Godmother's potion factory and steal a "Happily Ever After" potion that Shrek believes will restore Fiona's love for him.

Shrek and Donkey both drink the potion, but it appears as if it didn't work. When it starts to rain, they leave, and in doing so, fail to notice that the mushroom, which Shrek previously sneezed potion on, change into a beautiful rose. They wait out the storm in a barn and, while there, Shrek and Donkey fall over and into a deep sleep for no apparent reason. When they awake, they discover the potion's effects were only delayed: Shrek is now a handsome human, while Donkey has turned into a stallion. In order to make the change permanent, Shrek must kiss Fiona by midnight. He, Donkey, and Puss return to the castle to discover that the potion has also transformed Fiona back into her former, human self. However, the Fairy Godmother, having learned of the potion's theft, intercepts Shrek and sends Charming to pose as him and win her love. At the Fairy Godmother's urging, Shrek leaves the castle, believing that the best way to make Fiona happy is to let her go.

To ensure that Fiona falls in love with Charming, the Fairy Godmother gives Harold a love potion to put into Fiona's tea. But Harold replies that it's not possible to make his daughter fall in love in this way. This exchange is overheard by Shrek, Donkey, and Puss, who are soon arrested by the royal guards and thrown into a dungeon, in a parody of COPS. When the royal ball begins, several of Shrek's friends band together to free the trio and create a gigantic gingerbread man (whose name is Mongo), which breaks through the castle's defenses so Shrek can stop Charming from kissing Fiona, but Mongo is presumably killed when his arms break and he falls into the moat with Gingy devastated. Shrek finds he is too late to stop them; instead of falling in love with Charming, though, Fiona knocks him out with a headbutt, revealing that Harold never gave Fiona the love potion, having realized her love for Shrek. Enraged, the Fairy Godmother attacks Shrek with a spell from her wand, presumably to kill Shrek, but it rebounds off Harold's armor, when he commits self-sacrifice to save Shrek, and disintegrates the Fairy Godmother; it also returns Harold to his true form, that of the Frog Prince. The Fairy Godmother had made a deal with Harold to turn him into a handsome man, so that he could win over Lilian, to make her kiss him and change him into a human permanently, in exchange for Charming marrying his soon-to-be daughter.

As the clock strikes midnight, Shrek and Fiona let the potion's effects wear off and they revert to their ogre selves, while Donkey changes back as well, much to his chagrin. Harold gives his blessing to the marriage and apologizes for his earlier behavior; the party resumes and the credits begin as they sing (along with Mongo) "Livin' La Vida Loca".

In a Post-credit scene, Shrek, Fiona and Donkey are still partying in the night. Dragon, who Donkey has married following the events of the first film, arrives with some of her and Donkey's new children called the "Dronkeys".

Cast

Mike Myers as Shrek

Eddie Murphy as Donkey

Cameron Diaz as Princess Fiona

Julie Andrews as Queen Lillian

Antonio Banderas as Puss in Boots

John Cleese as King Harold

Rupert Everett as Prince Charming

Jennifer Saunders as Fairy Godmother

Joan Rivers (US)/Kate Thornton (UK) as Red Carpet Announcer

Larry King (US)/Jonathan Ross (UK) as Doris the Ugly Stepsister

Aron Warner as Big Bad Wolf

Cody Cameron as Pinocchio; The Three Little Pigs

Christopher Knights as Three Blind Mice

Conrad Vernon as Gingerbread Man; Muffin Man; Mongo; Cedric; Announcer

Tom Waits as Captain Hook

Chris Miller as Magic Mirror

Mark Moseley as Dresser

Kelly Cooney as Fast Food Clerk

Kelly Asbury as Page; Elf; Nobleman; Nobleman's son

Andrew Adamson as Captain of the Guard

; Special guest stars

Richard Fairbrass as himself (in the extended DVD version only)

Joan Rivers' cameo marked the first time that a real person had been represented on screen by the ''Shrek'' animation team. Her part (though retaining her visual representation) was redubbed by presenter Kate Thornton for the United Kingdom release, despite Rivers and her image being equally as well-known there.

On the DVD Special Features, Simon Cowell appears as himself on ''Far Far Away Idol'', a parody of ''American Idol''. (see Home Media)

Production

Dreamworks began making the film in 2001, after the release of the first ''Shrek'' film. Dreamworks made sure there was something new to see in ''Shrek 2'' by putting more human characters in the film than there were in its predecessor and improving their appearance. There were a few systems that dealt with hair and fur to improve its appearance and movement. Dreamworks worked on effects, rain systems, and moving clouds to make a dramatic scene where clouds roll in.

To get the look of the film, Dreamworks imagined what it would look like by painting, sketching and drawing. Character designer Tom Hester played a key look in defining the look by utilizing research, a fertile imagination, and clay to craft the film's characters. Tom did several versions of the characters. For example, he had 11 different designs of King Harold, going from very heavy, to very skinny.

Music

Counting Crows came at Dreamworks Studio to play a song for the film called Accidentally In Love. Singer and Songwriter Adams Duritz said that the song "fits into the movie because it's the story of people who fall in love who weren't supposed to fall in love. The score of the film was composed by Harry Gregson Williams which was performed at a high school. The score had to be operated on different levels which harry said as "Fun". His score came out as an Eels song into a very romantic scene with Shrek and Fiona, or a funny scene with donkey.

Release

In April 2004, the film was selected for competition at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. ''Shrek 2'' was originally going to release in June 2004. The film then planned to release on May 21, 2004. Though, ''Shrek 2'' released on May 19, 2004 (two days before). A day before the film went to theaters, the first five minutes were shown on Nickelodeon's ''U-Pick Live''. It was the first film with over 4,000 theaters in overall count; over 3,700 theaters was its count for an opening day. ''Spider-Man 2'' was the first film with over 4,000 theaters for an opening day and second for overall counts. When the film was released on DVD on November 5, 2004, it was the second ''Shrek'' film to be presented in its original ratio of 1.85:1 on the Region 1 anamorphic widescreen DVD.

Home media

This film has been released on VHS and DVD on November 2004 and on Game Boy Advance Video on November 2005. A 3D-converted version of the film has been released on Blu-ray Disc on December 1, 2010, along with the other three films of the series.

''Far Far Away Idol''

''Far Far Away Idol'' is an extra in the DVD release based on ''American Idol'' and guest starring Simon Cowell. Taking place right after ''Shrek 2'' ends, the plot was that characters from ''Shrek'' would sing and dance popular songs at the time, and at the end the viewer gets to pick the winner. However, if any character outside of Shrek (along with Princess Fiona), Donkey and Puss were selected, Cowell would refuse to accept the winner and proclaim himself the victor, leaping onto a table and performing his "own" rendition of "My Way". This segment was also seen on the ABC airings of the film, between the post-credits scene and the closing credits after. The winner on this airing is Simon Cowell, since there was no way the viewer could interactively pick the winner.

Reaction

Box office

The film opened at #1 with a Friday-to-Sunday total of $108,037,878, and a total of $128,983,060 since its Wednesday launch, from a then-record 4,163 theaters, for an average of $25,952 per theater over the weekend. At the time ''Shrek 2's'' Friday-to-Sunday total was the second-highest opening weekend trailing only ''Spider-Man's'' $114,844,116. In addition, Saturday alone managed to obtain $44,797,042, making it the highest single day gross at the time, beating ''Spider-Man's'' first Saturday gross of $43,622,264. It also ranked #1 in its second weekend, grossing $95,578,365 over the 4-day Memorial Day weekend, narrowly beating out the $85,807,341 4-day tally of new opener ''The Day After Tomorrow''. The film spent a total of 10 weeks in the weekly top 10, and stayed in theaters for 149 days (roughly 21 weeks), closing on November 25, 2004. It grossed $441,226,247 domestically (US and Canada), and $478,612,511 in foreign markets, making a total of $919.8 million worldwide making it the highest-grossing film of 2004, and the highest-grossing film of the ''Shrek'' franchise. This also puts the film at fifth on the all-time domestic box-office list and 18th on the worldwide box-office list. The movie also took away the highest worldwide gross made by an animated feature which before held by ''Finding Nemo'', although the latter still had a higher overseas-only gross. With DVD sales and ''Shrek 2'' merchandise are estimated to total almost $800 million, the film (which was produced with a budget of $150 million) is DreamWorks' most profitable film to date.

In August 2010 Disney and Pixar's ''Toy Story 3'' surpassed ''Shrek 2'' to become the highest-grossing animated film worldwide ($1.063 billion), but ''Shrek 2'' still holds the record for the highest-grossing animated film at the American and Canadian box office as well as the highest-grossing animated PG-rated film at this box office.

Critical response

The film was well received by a number of critics, many rating it as good as its predecessor, and some rated it even better. Based on reviews collected from 211 critics by the film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 89% gave ''Shrek 2'' a positive review. On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average rating of 75 out of 100 based on 40 professional reviews published in newspapers, magazines and in highly regarded Internet sites, which indicates "generally favorable reviews". Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars saying it's "bright, lively, and entertaining."

Awards and nominations

''Shrek 2'' won five People's Choice Awards: ''Favorite Animated Movie'', ''Favorite Animated Movie Star'' for "Donkey" (Eddie Murphy), ''Favorite Movie Comedy'', and ''Favorite Movie Villain'' for "Fairy Godmother" (Jennifer Saunders), and ''Favorite Sequel''. It also won two Teen Choice Awards: ''Choice Movie: Animated/Computer Generated'' and ''Choice Award Choice Movie - Comedy''. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, but lost to ''The Incredibles''. One of the film's songs, "Accidentally in Love" received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song, and the Grammy Award for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media.

The American Film Institute nominated ''Shrek 2'' for its Top 10 Animated Films list.

Spin-off

A spin-off of the film, ''Puss in Boots'', is set to be released on November 4, 2011, and will focus on the character of Puss in Boots, who was introduced in this film.

Other media

Video games

''Shrek 2'' (2004)

''Shrek Super Slam'' (2005)

''Shrek Smash n' Crash Racing'' (2006)

See also

List of animated feature-length films

List of computer-animated films

''Shrek 2'' (video game)

''Shrek SuperSlam'' the video game

''Shrek 2: Motion Picture Soundtrack'', the lyrical soundtrack by various artists

''Shrek 2: Original Motion Picture Score'', the instrumental score, composed by Harry Gregson-Williams

References

External links

Category:Computer-animated films Category:2004 films Category:2000s comedy films Category:American films Category:American fantasy-comedy films Category:American children's fantasy films Category:Films directed by Andrew Adamson Category:Films featuring anthropomorphic characters Category:DreamWorks Animation films Category:Sequel films Category:Shrek films Category:DreamWorks films Category:Animated features released by DreamWorks Category:American animated films

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name	Tom Waits
background	solo_singer
birth name	Thomas Alan Waits
born	December 07, 1949Pomona, California, United States
instrument	Vocals, piano, guitar
genre	rock, experimental music
occupation	Singer-songwriter, musician, actor, composer
years active	1972–present
label	Asylum Records, Island Records, ANTI-
website	tomwaits.com }}

Thomas Alan "Tom" Waits (born December 7, 1949) is an American singer-songwriter, composer, and actor. Waits has a distinctive voice, described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car." With this trademark growl, his incorporation of pre-rock music styles such as blues, jazz, and vaudeville, and experimental tendencies verging on industrial music, Waits has built up a distinctive musical persona. He has worked as a composer for movies and musical plays and as a supporting actor in films, including ''Down By Law'' and ''Bram Stoker's Dracula''. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his soundtrack work on ''One from the Heart''.

Lyrically, Waits' songs frequently present atmospheric portrayals of grotesque, often seedy characters and places – although he has also shown a penchant for more conventional ballads. He has a cult following and has influenced subsequent songwriters despite having little radio or music video support. His songs are best-known to the general public in the form of cover versions by more visible artists: "Jersey Girl", performed by Bruce Springsteen, "Ol' '55", performed by the Eagles, and "Downtown Train", performed by Rod Stewart. Although Waits' albums have met with mixed commercial success in his native United States, they have occasionally achieved gold album sales status in other countries. He has been nominated for a number of major music awards and has won Grammy Awards for two albums, ''Bone Machine'' and ''Mule Variations''. In 2011, Waits was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Waits currently lives in Sonoma County, California with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, and three children.

Origins and musical beginnings

Waits was born at Park Avenue Hospital in Pomona, California to Jesse Frank Waits and Alma Johnson McMurray, both schoolteachers. His father was of Scots-Irish descent and his mother was Norwegian American. After Waits' parents divorced in 1960, he lived with his mother in Whittier, and then moved to National City, in San Diego County, near the Mexico–United States border. Waits, who taught himself how to play the piano on a neighbor's instrument, often took trips to Mexico with his father, who taught Spanish; he would later say that he found his love of music during these trips through a Mexican ballad that was "probably a Ranchera, you know, on the car radio with my dad."

By 1965, while attending Hilltop High School within the Sweetwater Union High School District, Chula Vista, Waits was playing in an R&B;/soul band called The Systems and had begun his first job at Napoleone Pizza House in National City (about which he would later sing on "I Can't Wait to Get Off Work (And See My Baby on Montgomery Avenue)" from ''Small Change'' and "The Ghosts of Saturday Night (After Hours at Napoleone's Pizza House)" on ''The Heart of Saturday Night''). He later admitted that he was not a fan of the 1960s music scene, stating, "I wasn't thrilled by Blue Cheer, so I found an alternative, even if it was Bing Crosby." Five years later, he was working as a doorman at the Heritage nightclub in San Diego—where artists of every genre performed—when he did his first paid gig for $25. A fan of Bob Dylan, Lord Buckley, Jack Kerouac, Louis Armstrong, Howlin' Wolf, and Charles Bukowski, Waits began developing his own idiosyncratic musical style.

After serving with the United States Coast Guard, he took his newly formed act to Monday nights at The Troubadour in Los Angeles, where musicians would line up all day for the opportunity to perform on stage that night. In 1971, Waits moved to the Echo Park neighborhood of L.A. (at the time, also home to musicians Glenn Frey of the Eagles, J. D. Souther, Jackson Browne, and Frank Zappa) and signed with Herb Cohen at the age of 21. From August to December 1971, Waits made a series of demo recordings for Cohen's Bizarre/Straight label, including many songs for which he would later become known. These early tracks were eventually to be released twenty years later on ''The Early Years, Volume One'' and ''Volume Two''.

1970s

Waits signed to Asylum Records in 1972, and after numerous abortive recording sessions, his first record — the jazzy, folk-tinged ''Closing Time'' — was released in 1973. The album, which was produced and arranged by former Lovin' Spoonful member Jerry Yester, received positive reviews, but Waits did not gain widespread attention until a number of the album's tracks were covered by more prominent artists. Later in 1973, Tim Buckley released the album ''Sefronia'', which contained a cover version of Waits' song "Martha" from ''Closing Time'', the first-ever cover of a Tom Waits song by a known artist. This cover later appeared in the 1995 compilation ''Step Right Up: The Songs of Tom Waits''. The album's opening track, "Ol' '55", was recorded by the Eagles in 1974 for their ''On the Border'' album.

He began touring and opening for such artists as Charlie Rich, Martha and the Vandellas, and Frank Zappa. Waits received increasing critical acclaim and gathered a loyal cult following with his subsequent albums. ''The Heart of Saturday Night'' (1974), featuring the song "(Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night", revealed Waits's roots as a nightclub performer, with half-spoken and half-crooned ballads often accompanied by a jazz backup band. Waits described the album as:

...a comprehensive study of a number of aspects of this search for the center of Saturday night, which Jack Kerouac relentlessly chased from one end of this country to the other, and I've attempted to scoop up a few diamonds of this magic that I see.

In 1975, Waits moved to the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard and released the double album ''Nighthawks at the Diner'', recorded in a studio with a small audience in order to capture the ambience of a live show. The record exemplifies this phase of his career, including the lengthy spoken interludes between songs that punctuated his live act. That year, he also contributed backing vocals to Bonnie Raitt's "Your Sweet and Shiny Eyes", from her album ''Home Plate''.

By this time, Waits was drinking heavily, and life on the road was starting to take its toll. Waits, looking back at the period, has said,

I was sick through that whole period [...] It was starting to wear on me, all the touring. I'd been traveling quite a bit, living in hotels, eating bad food, drinking a lot — too much. There's a lifestyle that's there before you arrive and you're introduced to it. It's unavoidable.

In reaction to these hardships, Waits recorded ''Small Change'' (1976), which finds him in a much more cynical and pessimistic mood, lyrically, with many songs such as "The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) (An Evening With Pete King)" and "Bad Liver and a Broken Heart (In Lowell)". With the album, Waits asserted that he "tried to resolve a few things as far as this cocktail lounge, maudlin, crying-in-your-beer image that I have. There ain't nothin' funny about a drunk [...] I was really starting to believe that there was something amusing and wonderfully American about being a drunk. I ended up telling myself to cut that shit out." The album, which also included long-time fan favorite "Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)", featured famed drummer Shelly Manne and was, like his previous albums, heavily influenced by jazz.

''Small Change'', which was accompanied by the double A-side single "Step Right Up"/"The Piano Has Been Drinking", was a critical and commercial success and far outsold any of Waits's previous albums. With it, Waits broke onto ''Billboard'''s Top 100 Albums chart for the first time in his career (a feat Waits would not repeat until 1999 with the release of ''Mule Variations''). This resulted in a much higher public profile, which brought with it interviews and articles in ''Time'', ''Newsweek'', and ''Vogue''. Waits put together a regular touring band, The Nocturnal Emissions, which featured Frank Vicari on tenor saxophone, Fitzgerald Jenkins on bass guitar, and Chip White on drums and vibraphone. Tom Waits and the Nocturnal Emissions toured the United States and Europe extensively from October 1976 until May 1977, including a performance of "The Piano Has Been Drinking" on cult BBC2 television music show the ''Old Grey Whistle Test'' in May 1976.

''Foreign Affairs'' (1977) was musically in a similar vein to ''Small Change'', but showed further artistic refinement and exploration into jazz and blues styles. Particularly noteworthy is the long cinematic spoken-word piece, "Potter's Field", set to an orchestral score. The album also features Bette Midler singing a duet with Waits on "I Never Talk to Strangers." The album ''Blue Valentine'' (1978) displayed Waits's biggest musical departure to date, with much more focus on electric guitar and keyboards than on previous albums and hardly any strings (with the exception of album-opener "Somewhere" — a cover of Leonard Bernstein's song from ''West Side Story'' — and "Kentucky Avenue") for a darker, more blues-oriented sound. The song "Blue Valentines" was also unique for Waits in that it featured a desolate arrangement of solo electric guitar played by Ray Crawford, accompanied by Waits' vocal. Around this time, Waits had a relationship with Rickie Lee Jones (who appears on the sleeve art of the ''Blue Valentine'' album). In 1978, Waits also appeared in his first film role, in ''Paradise Alley'' as Mumbles the pianist, and contributed the original compositions "(Meet Me in) Paradise Alley" and "Annie's Back in Town" to the film's soundtrack.

''Heartattack and Vine'', Waits's last studio album for Asylum, was released in 1980, featuring a developing sound that included both ballads ("Jersey Girl") and rougher-edged rhythm and blues. The same year, he began a long working relationship with Francis Ford Coppola, who asked Waits to provide music for his film ''One from the Heart''. For Coppola's film, Waits originally wanted to work with Bette Midler; she was unavailable due to prior engagements, however. Waits ended up working with singer/songwriter Crystal Gayle as his vocal foil for the album.

1980s

In August 1980, Waits married Kathleen Brennan, a screenwriter, whom he had met while working on the set of the Francis Ford Coppola movie ''One from the Heart''. Brennan is regularly credited as co-author of many songs in his later albums, and Waits often cites her as a major influence on his work. She introduced him to the music of Captain Beefheart. Despite having shared a manager with Beefheart in the 1970s, Waits says, "I became more acquainted with him when I got married." Waits would later describe his relationship with Brennan as a paradigm shift in his musical development. After leaving Asylum, the label released the first Tom Waits "Best of" album in 1981, a collection called ''Bounced Checks'', notable for including an alternate, stripped down version of "Jersey Girl" and the otherwise unreleased "Mr. Henry", as well as an alternate master of "Whistlin' Past the Graveyard" and a live performance of "The Piano Has Been Drinking". During this period, Waits appeared in a series of minor movie roles, including a cameo role in ''Wolfen'' (1981) as an inebriated piano player, and his song "Jitterbug Boy" also appeared on the movie's soundtrack. ''One from the Heart'' received its official theatrical release in 1982, with Waits appearing in a cameo as a trumpet player as well as receiving an Oscar nomination for Original Song Score (eventually losing out to ''Victor Victoria'', by Henry Mancini and Leslie Bricusse). This marked the first in a series of collaborations between Waits and Coppola, with Waits appearing in cameos in Coppola's movies ''The Outsiders'' (1983), ''Rumble Fish'' (1983), and ''The Cotton Club'' (1984), and a major role in ''Bram Stoker's Dracula''. Waits also contributed two songs to the documentary ''Streetwise'' (1984), "Rat's Theme" and "Take Care of All My Children".

After leaving Asylum for Island Records, Waits released ''Swordfishtrombones'' in 1983, a record that marked a sharp turn in his musical direction. While Waits had before played either piano or guitar, he now gravitated towards less common instruments, saying, "Your hands are like dogs, going to the same places they've been. You have to be careful when playing is no longer in the mind but in the fingers, going to happy places. You have to break them of their habits or you don't explore; you only play what is confident and pleasing. I'm learning to break those habits by playing instruments I know absolutely nothing about, like a bassoon or a waterphone." ''Swordfishtrombones'' also introduced instruments such as bagpipes ("Town with No Cheer") and marimba ("Shore Leave") to Waits' repertoire, as well as pump organs, percussion (sometimes reminiscent of the music of Harry Partch), horn sections (often featuring Ralph Carney playing in the style of brass bands or soul music), experimental guitar, and obsolete instruments (many of Waits' albums have featured a damaged, unpredictable Chamberlin, and more recent albums have included the little-used Stroh violin).

His songwriting shifted as well, moving away from the traditional piano-and-strings ballad sound of his 1970s output towards a number of styles largely ignored in pop music, including primal blues, cabaret stylings, rumbas, theatrical approaches in the style of Kurt Weill, tango music, early country music and European folk music as well as the Tin Pan Alley-era songs that influenced his early output. He also recorded a spoken word piece, "Frank's Wild Years", influenced by Ken Nordine's "word jazz" records of the 1950s. Apart from Captain Beefheart and some of Dr. John's early output, there was little precedent in popular music.

Waits's new emphasis on experimenting with various styles and instrumentation continued on 1985's ''Rain Dogs'', a sprawling, 19-song collection which received glowing reviews (the album was ranked #21 on ''Rolling Stone'''s list of the 100 greatest albums of the 1980s. In 2003, the album was ranked number 397 on ''Rolling Stone'' magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.) Contributions from guitarists Marc Ribot, Robert Quine, and Keith Richards accompanied Waits' move away from piano-based songs, in juxtaposition with an increased emphasis on instruments such as marimba, accordion, double bass, trombone, and banjo. The album also spawned the 12" single "Downtown Train/Tango Till They're Sore/Jockey Full of Bourbon", with Jean Baptiste Mondino filming a promotional music video for "Downtown Train" (which would later become a hit for Rod Stewart), featuring a cameo from boxing legend Jake LaMotta. The album peaked at #188 on Billboard's Top 200 albums chart; however, its reputation has come to far outshine low initial sales.

''Franks Wild Years'', a musical play by Waits and Brennan, was staged as an Off-Broadway musical in 1986, directed by Gary Sinise, in a successful run at Chicago's famed Steppenwolf Theater. Waits himself played the lead role. Waits developed his acting career with several supporting roles and a lead role in Jim Jarmusch's ''Down by Law'' in 1986, which also featured two of Waits's songs from ''Rain Dogs'' in the soundtrack. In the same year, Waits also contributed vocals to the song "Harlem Shuffle" on The Rolling Stones' album ''Dirty Work''.

In 1987, he released ''Franks Wild Years'' (subtitled "Un Operachi Romantico in Two Acts"), which included studio versions from Waits' play of the same name. ''Rolling Stone'' summed up the album's myriad styles this way: "Everything from sleazy strip-show blues to cheesy waltzes to supercilious lounge lizardry is given spare, jarring arrangements using various combinations of squawking horns, bashed drums, plucked banjo, snaky double bass, carnival organ and jaunty accordion." Waits also continued to further his acting career with a supporting role as Rudy the Kraut in ''Ironweed'' (an adaptation of William Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel) alongside Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, in which Waits performed the song "Big Rock Candy Mountain", as well as a part in Robert Frank's ''Candy Mountain'', in which Waits also performed "Once More Before I Go." In 1988, Waits performed in ''Big Time'', a surreal concert movie and soundtrack which he cowrote with his wife.

In 1989, Waits appeared in his final theatrical stage role to date, appearing as Curly in Thomas Babe's ''Demon Wine'', alongside Bill Pullman, Philip Baker Hall, Carol Kane, and Bud Cort. The play opened at the Los Angeles Theater Center in February 1989 to mixed reviews, although Waits' performance was singled out by a number of critics, including John C. Mahoney, who described it as "mesmerizing." Waits finished the decade with appearances in three movies: as the voice of a radio DJ in Jim Jarmusch's ''Mystery Train''; as Kenny the Hitman in Robert Dornhelm's ''Cold Feet''; and the lead role of Punch & Judy man Silva in ''Bearskin: An Urban Fairytale''. His only musical output of the year consisted of contributing his cover of Phil Phillips' "Sea of Love" to the soundtrack of the Al Pacino movie of the same name and contributing vocals to The Replacements song "Date to Church", which appeared as a B-side to their single "I'll Be You".

1990s

''The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets'' — a theatrical collaboration of Waits, director Robert Wilson, and writer William S. Burroughs — premiered at Hamburg's Thalia Theatre on March 31, 1990. The project was based on a German folktale called ''Der Freischütz'', with Wilson responsible for the design and direction, Burroughs for writing the book, and Waits for music and lyrics, which were heavily influenced by the works of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. In the same year, Waits contributed a cover of Cole Porter's "It's All Right with Me" to ''Red Hot + Blue'', the first in the series of compilation albums from the Red Hot Organization — one of the first major AIDS benefits in the music business — which sold over a million copies worldwide. Jim Jarmusch directed a promotional music video for the song. Waits also collaborated with photographer Sylvia Plachy in the same year; her book ''Sylvia Plachy's Unguided Tour'' includes a short Waits record to accompany the photographs and text.

The following year, Waits was extremely busy working on movie soundtracks, acting, and contributing to a number of music projects by other artists. First, Waits appeared on the Primus album ''Sailing the Seas of Cheese'' as the voice of "Tommy the Cat", which exposed him to a new audience in alternative rock. This was the first of several collaborations between Waits and the group; Frontman Les Claypool would appear on several subsequent Waits releases. The same year saw Waits provide spoken word contributions to ''Devout Catalyst'', an album by one of Waits' greatest influences, Ken Nordine, on the songs "A Thousand Bing Bangs" and "The Movie." Waits also contributed vocals to a duet with singer Bob Forrest on the song "Adios Lounge" on the Thelonious Monster album ''Beautiful Mess''. He also contributed vocals to two songs ("Little Man" and "I'm Not Your Fool Anymore") on jazz tenor saxophonist Teddy Edwards' album ''Mississippi Lad''. Edwards was extremely complimentary of Waits' contributions, saying:

Tom Waits is the one who got me my contract with PolyGram. He's wonderful, he's America's best lyricist since Johnny Mercer. He came down to the studio on the ''Mississippi Lad'' album, that's the first one I did for PolyGram, and he sang two of my songs, wouldn't accept any money, just trying to give me the best boost that he could.

The only collection of exclusively Waits-performed material of 1991 appeared when Waits composed and conducted the almost exclusively instrumental music for Jim Jarmusch's 1991 film ''Night on Earth'', which was released as an album the following year. In July 1991, Screamin' Jay Hawkins released the album ''Black Music for White People'', which features covers of two Waits compositions: "Heartattack & Vine" (which later that year was used in a European Levi's advertisement without Waits' permission, resulting in a lawsuit) and "Ice Cream Man". Waits continued to appear in movie acting roles, the most significant of which was his uncredited cameo as a disabled veteran in Terry Gilliam's ''The Fisher King''. He also appeared alongside Kevin Bacon, John Malkovich, and Jamie Lee Curtis in Steve Rash's ''Queens Logic'', and opposite Tom Berenger and Kathy Bates in Hector Babenco's film ''At Play in the Fields of the Lord'', adapted from Peter Matthiessen's 1965 novel.

''Bone Machine'', Waits's first studio album in five years, was released in 1992. The stark record featured a great deal of percussion and guitar (with little piano or sax), marking another change in Waits' sound. Critic Steve Huey calls it "perhaps Tom Waits's most cohesive album... a morbid, sinister nightmare, one that applied the quirks of his experimental '80s classics to stunningly evocative — and often harrowing — effect... Waits' most affecting and powerful recording, even if it isn't his most accessible." ''Bone Machine'' was awarded a Grammy in the Best Alternative Album category. On December 19, 1992 ''Alice'', Waits's second theatrical project with Robert Wilson, premiered at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg. Paul Schmidt adapted the text from the works of Lewis Carroll (''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' and ''Through the Looking-Glass'', in particular), with songs by Waits and Kathleen Brennan presented as intersections with the text rather than as expansions of the story, as would be the case in conventional musical theater. These songs would be recorded by Waits as a studio album 10 years later on ''Alice''. 1992 also saw Waits featuring in Francis Ford Coppola's film ''Bram Stoker's Dracula'', as the possessed lunatic Renfield.

In 1993, he released ''The Black Rider'', which contained studio versions of the songs that Waits had written for the musical of the same name three years previously, with the exceptions of "Chase the Clouds Away" and "In the Morning", which appeared in the theatrical production but not on the studio album. William S. Burroughs also guests on vocals on "'Tain't No Sin". In the same year, Waits lent his vocals to Gavin Bryars' 75-minute reworking of his 1971 classical music piece ''Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet''; appeared in Robert Altman's film version of Raymond Carver's stories ''Short Cuts'' and Jim Jarmusch's ''Coffee and Cigarettes: Somewhere in California'', a short black-and-white movie with Iggy Pop; and his third child, Sullivan, was born. In 1997, Waits and Brennan wrote and performed the music for ''Bunny'' the animated short film by 20th Century Fox's Blue Sky Studios, which was awarded Best Animated Short Film by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In 1995, Holly Cole released ''Temptation'', a tribute album consisting entirely of Waits covers.

Another Waits cover was released in 1996, as Meat Loaf covered ''Martha'' for his concept album ''Welcome to the Neighborhood''.

In 1998, after Island Records released the compilation ''Beautiful Maladies: The Island Years'', Waits left the label for Epitaph, whose president, Andy Kaulkin, said the label was "...blown away that Tom would even consider us. We are huge fans." Waits himself was full of praise for the label, saying "Epitaph is rare for being owned and operated by musicians. They have good taste and a load of enthusiasm, plus they're nice people. And they gave me a brand-new Cadillac, of course."

Waits's first album on his new label, ''Mule Variations'', was issued in 1999. ''Billboard'' described the album as musically melding "backwoods blues, skewed gospel, and unruly art stomp into a sublime piece of junkyard sound sculpture." The album was Waits' first release to feature a turntablist. The album won a Grammy in 2000; as an indicator of how difficult it is to classify Waits's music, he was nominated simultaneously for Best Contemporary Folk Album (which he won) and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance (for the song "Hold On"), both different from the genre for which he won his previous Grammy. The album was also his highest-charting album in the U.S. to date, reaching #30.

The same year, Waits made a foray into producing music for other artists, teaming up with his old friend Chuck E. Weiss to coproduce (with his wife, Kathleen Brennan) ''Extremely Cool'', as well as appearing on the record as a guest vocalist and guitarist. He also contributed a cover of Skip Spence's "Books of Moses" to ''More Oar: A Tribute to the Skip Spence Album'', a collection of covers of the singer's songs on Birdman Records. The same year, Waits appeared in the comedy ''Mystery Men''.

2000s

John Hammond's ''Wicked Grin'', a collection of Waits cover songs, was released in 2001. Waits appears on most songs, playing guitar, piano, and/or offering backing vocals. The album also includes the traditional hymn "I Know I've Been Changed", performed as a duet by Hammond and Waits.

Tori Amos included a cover of the song "Time", from ''Rain Dogs'' on her 2001 album ''Strange Little Girls''. In 2002, Waits simultaneously released two albums, ''Alice'' and ''Blood Money''. Both collections had been written almost 10 years previously and were based on theatrical collaborations with Robert Wilson; the former a musical play about Lewis Carroll, and the latter an interpretation of Georg Büchner's play fragment ''Woyzeck''. Both albums revisit the tango, Tin Pan Alley, and spoken-word influences of ''Swordfishtrombones'', while the lyrics are both profoundly cynical and melancholic, exemplified by "Misery is the River of the World" and "Everything Goes to Hell." "Diamond in Your Mind", which Waits wrote for Wilson's ''Woyzeck'', did not appear on ''Blood Money''; however, it did emerge on Solomon Burke's album ''Don't Give Up on Me'' of the same year. While Waits has played the song live a number of times, an official version would not be released until 2007. The same year, Waits contributed a version of "The Return of Jackie and Judy" by The Ramones to the compilation album ''We're a Happy Family - A Tribute to Ramones'', which was released in 2003 on Columbia Records. That same year, Waits was also a judge for the 2nd annual Independent Music Awards to support independent artists' careers. Waits was also a judge for the 10th annual Independent Music Awards.

Waits released ''Real Gone'', his first nontheatrical studio album since ''Mule Variations'', in 2004. It is Waits's only album to date to feature absolutely no piano on any of its tracks. Waits beatboxes on the opening track, "Top of the Hill", and most of the album's songs begin with Waits's "vocal percussion" improvisations. It is also more rock-oriented, with less blues influence than he has previously demonstrated. The same year, Waits contributed backing vocals to the track "Go Tell It on the Mountain" on the Grammy Award (Best Traditional Gospel Album)-winning album of the same name by The Blind Boys of Alabama. He also contributed a version of Daniel Johnston's "King Kong" to the tribute album ''The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered'', released on Gammon Records.

At this time, Waits made a return to acting after a five-year break, marked at first by the re-release of his 1993 Jim Jarmusch-directed short ''Coffee and Cigarettes: Somewhere in California'', costarring Iggy Pop, compiled in ''Coffee and Cigarettes''. In 2005, Waits appeared in the Tony Scott film ''Domino'' as a soothsayer. In the same year, Waits appeared as himself in Roberto Benigni's romantic comedy ''La Tigre e la Neve'', set in occupied Baghdad during the Iraq War. In the movie, Waits appears in a dream scene as himself, singing the ballad "You Can Never Hold Back Spring" and accompanying himself at the piano.

A 54-song three-disc box set of rarities, unreleased tracks, and brand-new compositions called ''Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards'' was released in November 2006. The three discs are subdivided relating to their content: "Brawlers" features Waits's more upbeat rock and blues songs; "Bawlers", his ballads and love songs; and "Bastards", songs that fit in neither category, including a number of spoken-word tracks. A video for the song "Lie to Me" was produced as a promotion for the collection. ''Orphans'' also continues Waits's newfound interest in politics with "Road to Peace", a song about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The album is also notable for containing a number of covers of songs by other artists, including The Ramones ("The Return of Jackie and Judy" and "Danny Says"), Daniel Johnston ("King Kong"), Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht ("What Keeps Mankind Alive"), and Leadbelly ("Ain't Goin' Down to the Well" and "Goodnight Irene"), as well as renditions of works by poets and authors admired by Waits, such as Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac and a previously released duet with Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse entitled "Dog Door". Waits' albums ''Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards'' and ''Alice'' are both included in metacritic.com's list of the "Top 200: Best-Reviewed Albums" since 2000 at #10 and #20, respectively (as of November 2009). The same years, Waits appeared on Sparklehorse's album ''Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain'', playing piano on the track "Morning Hollow."

Five different versions of Waits's song "Way Down in the Hole" have been used as the opening theme songs for the HBO television show ''The Wire''. Waits's own version, from ''Frank's Wild Years'', was used for season two. The other versions used for the series were performed by, in season order, The Blind Boys of Alabama, The Neville Brothers, "DoMaJe" and Steve Earle.

Waits made a number of high-profile television and concert appearances between 2006 and 2010. In November 2006, Waits appeared on ''The Daily Show'' and performed "The Day After Tomorrow." This was significant for his having been only the third performing guest on the show, the first being Tenacious D and the second The White Stripes. On May 4, 2007, Waits performed "Lucinda" and "Ain't Goin' Down to the Well" from ''Orphans'' on the last show of a week ''Late Night with Conan O'Brien'' spent in San Francisco. There was a short interview after the last performance. Waits also played in the Bridge School Benefit on October 27–28, 2007 with Kronos Quartet.

On July 10, 2007, Waits released the download-only digital single "Diamond In Your Mind". The version of the song was recorded with Kronos Quartet, with Greg Cohen, Philip Glass, and The Dalai Lama at the benefit concert "Healing The Divide: A Concert for Peace and Reconciliation" at Avery Fisher Hall, recorded on September 21, 2003.

Waits's song "Trampled Rose" (from ''Real Gone'') appeared on the critically acclaimed album ''Raising Sand'', a collaboration between Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. Waits also provided guest vocals on the song "Pray" by fellow ANTI- artists The Book of Knots on their album ''Traineater''.

He played the role of Kneller in the film ''Wristcutters: A Love Story'', which opened in November 2007.

On January 22, 2008, Waits made a rare live appearance in Los Angeles, performing at a benefit for Bet Tzedek Legal Services—The House of Justice, a nonprofit poverty law center.

On May 7, 2008, Waits announced the Glitter and Doom Tour starting in June 2008, touring cities in the southern United States and subsequently announced a series of dates in the UK, Ireland and mainland Europe. Waits was awarded the key to the city of El Paso, Texas during a concert on June 20, 2008. In his generally positive review of the opening show of the tour, ''The Wall Street Journal'' critic Jim Fusilli described Waits' music thus: }}

On May 20, 2008 Scarlett Johansson's debut album, entitled ''Anywhere I Lay My Head'', featured covers of ten Tom Waits songs. Waits made an appearance on the album ''The Spirit of Apollo'' by alternative hip hop project N.A.S.A., on the track "Spacious Thoughts."

Waits wrote the following introduction for the Tompkins Square compilation ''People Take Warning – Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs, 1913–1938'':

In late 2009, Terry Gilliam's film ''The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus'' was released, with Waits in the role of Mr. Nick. Production began in December 2007 in London. Star Heath Ledger's death in January 2008 cast doubt on the film's future, but the production was salvaged with the addition of new actors playing his character in scenes he did not complete.

2010s

Waits played the role of "The Engineer" in the film ''The Book of Eli'', opposite Denzel Washington, which opened in January 2010.

He is currently working on a new stage musical with director and long-time collaborator Robert Wilson and playwright Martin McDonagh.

In early 2011, Tom Waits completed a set of 23 poems entitled ''Seeds on Hard Ground'', which were inspired by Michael O'Brien's portraits of the homeless in his upcoming book, ''Hard Ground'', which will include the poems alongside the portraits. In anticipation of the book release, Waits and Anti- printed limited edition chapbooks of the poems to raise money for Redwood Empire Food Bank, a homeless referral and family support service in Sonoma County, California. As of January 26, 2011, four editions, each limited to a thousand copies costing $24.99US each, sold out, raising $90,000 for the food bank.

It was announced on February 9, 2011, that Waits was to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Neil Young. The ceremony was held at the Waldorf-Astoria on Monday, March 14, 2011, at 8:30pm EST. Waits accepted the award with his customary humor, stating, "They say I have no hits and that I'm difficult to work with... like it's a bad thing."

On February 24, 2011, it was announced via Waits' official website that he has begun work on his next studio album.

Waits said through his website that on August 23 he would "set the record straight" in regards to rumors of a new release. On August 23, the title of the new album was revealed to be ''Bad as Me'', and a new single, also titled "Bad as Me," started being offered via Amazon.com and other sites.

Record companies

Waits has often switched to smaller independent record companies over the years; he signed to Asylum Records before they were bought out by Elektra Records and Warner Bros. During his time with Island Records, that label expanded from a small company to a music industry giant. He then signed to Anti Records, a division of Epitaph Records.

Lawsuits

Waits has steadfastly refused to allow the use of his songs in commercials and has joked about other artists who do (commenting "If Michael Jackson wants to work for Pepsi, why doesn't he just get himself a suit and an office in their headquarters and be done with it?"). He has filed several lawsuits against advertisers who used his material without permission. He has been quoted as saying, "Apparently, the highest compliment our culture grants artists nowadays is to be in an ad — ideally, naked and purring on the hood of a new car", he said in a statement, referring to the Mercury Cougar. "I have adamantly and repeatedly refused this dubious honor."

Waits filed his first lawsuit in 1988 against Frito-Lay. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed an award of $2.375-million in his favor (''Waits v. Frito-Lay'', 978 F. 2d 1093 (9th Cir. 1992)). Frito-Lay had approached Waits to use one of his songs in an advertisement. Waits declined the offer, and Frito-Lay hired a Waits soundalike to sing a jingle similar to ''Small Change'''s "Step Right Up", which is, ironically, a song Waits has called "an indictment of advertising". Waits won the lawsuit, becoming one of the first artists to successfully sue a company for using an impersonator without permission.

In 1993, Levi's used Screamin' Jay Hawkins' version of Waits' "Heartattack and Vine" in a commercial. Waits sued, and Levi's agreed to cease all use of the song and offered a full page apology in ''Billboard''. Waits found himself in a situation similar to his earlier one with Frito Lay in 2000 when Audi approached him, asking to use "Innocent When You Dream" (from ''Franks Wild Years'') for a commercial broadcast in Spain. Waits declined, but the commercial ultimately featured music very similar to that song. Waits undertook legal action, and a Spanish court recognized that there had been a violation of Waits's moral rights in addition to the infringement of copyright. The production company, Tandem Campany Guasch, was ordered to pay compensation to Waits through his Spanish publisher. Waits was later quoted as jokingly saying the company got the name of the song wrong, thinking it was called "Innocent When You Scheme".

In 2005, Waits sued Adam Opel AG, claiming that, after having failed to sign him to sing in their Scandinavian commercials, they had hired a sound-alike singer. In 2007, the suit was settled, and Waits gave the sum to charity.

Waits has also filed a lawsuit unrelated to his music. He was arrested in 1977 outside Duke's Tropicana Coffee Shop in Los Angeles. Waits and a friend were trying to stop some men from bullying other patrons. The men were plainclothes police, and Waits and his friend were taken into custody and charged with disturbing the peace. The jury found Waits not guilty; he took the police department to court and was awarded $7,500 compensation.

Discography and filmography

Tours

1973: ''Closing Time'' touring

1974–1975: ''The Heart of Saturday Night'' touring

1975–1976: ''Small Change'' touring

1977: ''Foreign Affairs'' touring

1978–1979: ''Blue Valentine'' touring

1980–1982: ''Heartattack and Vine'' touring

1985: ''Rain Dogs'' touring

1987: ''Big Time'' touring

1999: ''Get Behind the Mule Tour''

2004: ''Real Gone Tour''

2006: ''The Orphans Tour''

2008: ''Glitter and Doom Tour''

Further reading

References

External links

Discography at the Tom Waits Library

Interview with Amanda Petrusich, Pitchfork Media, November 27, 2006

Interview with Jon Stewart, ''The Daily Show'', November 28, 2006

Tom Waits at NPR Music, contains interviews

Category:1949 births Category:Living people Category:American people of Norwegian descent Category:American composers Category:American film actors Category:American male singers Category:American multi-instrumentalists Category:American musicians of Norwegian descent Category:American people of Scotch-Irish descent Category:American rock singers Category:American blues singers Category:American singer-songwriters Category:Eels (band) members Category:English-language singers Category:Epitaph Records artists Category:Grammy Award winners Category:People from Chula Vista, California Category:People from Pomona, California Category:People from the San Fernando Valley Category:People from Sonoma County, California Category:Singers from California Category:Songwriters from California Category:Writers from California Category:Sebastopol, California Category:Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Category:People from Echo Park, Los Angeles

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name	Eddie Murphy
birth name	Edward Regan Murphy
birth date	April 03, 1961
birth place	Brooklyn, New York, United States
medium	Film, Television, Stand-up, Music, Books
nationality	American
active	1976–present
genre	Observational comedy, Musical comedy, Black comedy, Satire, Physical comedy
subject	Race relations, Racism, African American culture, Marriage, Everyday life, Current events, Pop culture, Human sexuality
influences	Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, Peter Sellers, Redd Foxx
spouse	Nicole Mitchell (1993–2006) (divorced) 5 childrenTracey Edmonds (2008) (annulled)
domesticpartner	Melanie Brown (2006–07) 1 child
othername	Fred Braughton, Edward "Eddie" Regan Murphy, Edie Murphy, Edward Regan Murphy, Eddy Murphy
notable work	Axel Foley in ''Beverly Hills Cop'' Various on ''Saturday Night Live''''Shrek'' series
website	}}

Edward Regan "Eddie" Murphy (born April 3, 1961) is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, singer, director, and musician.

Box office takes from Murphy's films makes him the second-highest grossing actor in the United States. He was a regular cast member on ''Saturday Night Live'' from 1980 to 1984 and has worked as a stand-up comedian. He was ranked #10 on Comedy Central's list of the 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time.

He has received Golden Globe Award nominations for his performances in ''48 Hrs'', ''Beverly Hills Cop'' series, ''Trading Places'', and ''The Nutty Professor''. In 2007, he won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor and received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of soul singer James "Thunder" Early in ''Dreamgirls''.

Murphy's work as a voice actor includes Thurgood Stubbs in ''The PJs'', Donkey in the ''Shrek'' series and the dragon Mushu in Disney's ''Mulan''. In some of his films, he plays multiple roles in addition to his main character, intended as a tribute to one of his idols Peter Sellers, who played multiple roles in ''Dr. Strangelove'' and elsewhere. Murphy has played multiple roles in ''Coming to America'', Wes Craven's ''Vampire In Brooklyn'', the ''Nutty Professor'' films (where he played the title role in two incarnations, plus his father, brother, mother, and grandmother), ''Bowfinger'', and 2007's ''Norbit''.

Early life

Murphy grew up in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. His mother, Lillian, was a telephone operator, and his father, Charles Edward Murphy, was a transit police officer and an amateur actor and comedian. His father died when he was young. When Murphy's single mom became ill, the eight-year-old Eddie Murphy and his older brother lived in foster care for one year. In interviews, the actor and comedian says that his time in foster care was influential in developing his sense of humour. Later Murphy and his older brother Charlie were raised in Roosevelt, New York by his mother and stepfather Vernon Lynch, a foreman at an ice cream plant. Around the age of 15, Murphy was writing and performing his own routines, which were heavily influenced by Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor.

Career

Stand-up comedy

Murphy performed stand-up at the same Bay Area Comedy Club as Robin Williams and Whoopi Goldberg. His early comedy was characterized by frequent swearing and sketches lampooning a diverse group of people (including WASPs, African Americans, Italian Americans, overweight people, and gays). This racy content was akin to that of Richard Pryor, whom Murphy has credited as his inspiration to enter comedy; however, in his autobiography, ''Pryor Convictions'', Pryor wrote that he found Murphy's comedy at times excessively insensitive. Murphy later apologized for insensitive jokes about gays and HIV. The stand-up shows ''Delirious'' and ''Raw'' have been recorded and released.

1980s acting career

Murphy first earned attention as a regular actor at ''Saturday Night Live'', and was credited with helping revitalize the series during its first true slump in quality in the early 1980s. Some of his notable characters included a grown version of the Little Rascals character Buckwheat, impoverished but street-wise children's show host Mr. Robinson (a spoof of Fred Rogers, who found it amusing), and Gumby, a harshly cynical version of the animated character; Murphy's take on the latter character spawned one of SNL's many catchphrases, "I'm Gumby, dammit!" Although Buckwheat was his most popular character, Murphy asked that he be retired because the actor grew tired of people asking him to "Do Buckwheat! Do Buckwheat!"; the character was assassinated on camera in front of 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

In 1982, Murphy made his big screen debut in the film ''48 Hrs.'' with Nick Nolte. ''48 Hrs.'' proved to be a hit when it was released in the Christmas season of 1982. Nolte was scheduled to host the December 11, 1982 Christmas episode of ''Saturday Night Live'', but became too ill to host, so Murphy took over. He became the only cast member to host while still a regular. Murphy opened the show with the phrase, "Live from New York, It's the Eddie Murphy Show!" The following year, Murphy starred in ''Trading Places'' with fellow ''SNL'' alumnus Dan Aykroyd. The movie marked the first of Murphy's collaborations with director John Landis (who also directed Murphy in ''Coming to America'' and ''Beverly Hills Cop III'') and proved to be an even greater box office success than ''48 Hrs''. In 1984, Murphy starred in the successful action comedy film ''Beverly Hills Cop''. The film was Murphy's first full-fledged starring vehicle, originally intended to star Sylvester Stallone (who later tweaked the script as his own starring vehicle ''Cobra'' in 1986). ''Beverly Hills Cop'' grossed over $230 million at the box office and is 40th in the list of all-time total U.S. box office grosses (4th-highest amongst "R" rated films), after adjusting for inflation, .

In 1984, Murphy appeared in ''Best Defense'', co-starring Dudley Moore. Murphy, who was credited as a "Strategic Guest Star", was added to the film after an original version was completed but tested poorly with audiences. ''Best Defense'' was a major financial and critical disappointment. When he hosted ''SNL'', Murphy joined the chorus of those bashing ''Best Defense'', calling it "the worst movie in the history of everything". Murphy's ''Trading Places'' co-star Dan Aykroyd had originally written the character of Winston Zeddemore in ''Ghostbusters'' specifically for Murphy, but he was unable to commit at the time due to the ''Beverly Hills Cop'' shooting schedule. The part ultimately went to Ernie Hudson. Murphy was also offered a part in 1986's ''Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home'', a role that, after being heavily re-written from comic relief to love interest, ultimately went to future ''7th Heaven'' star Catherine Hicks. By this point Murphy's near-exclusive contract with Paramount Pictures rivaled ''Star Trek'' as Paramount's most lucrative franchise.

In 1986, Murphy starred in the supernatural comedy, ''The Golden Child''. ''The Golden Child'' was originally intended to be a serious adventure picture starring Mel Gibson. After Gibson turned the role down, the project was offered to Murphy as it was subsequently rewritten as a partial comedy. Although ''The Golden Child'' (featuring Murphy's "I want the knife!" routine) performed well at the box office, the movie was not as critically acclaimed as ''48 Hrs.'', ''Trading Places'', and ''Beverly Hills Cop''. ''The Golden Child'' was considered a change of pace for Murphy because of the supernatural setting as opposed to the more "street smart" settings of Murphy's previous efforts. A year later, Murphy reprised his role of Axel Foley in the Tony Scott-directed ''Beverly Hills Cop II''. It was a box office success, grossing over $150 million. Producers reportedly wanted to turn the ''Beverly Hills Cop'' franchise into a weekly television series. Murphy declined the television offer, but was willing to do a film sequel instead.

Murphy was one of the last movie actors to sign an exclusive contract with a studio. In this case, it was Paramount Pictures, which released all of his early films.

Singing career

Murphy is also a singer and musician, having frequently provided background vocals to songs released by The Bus Boys. As a solo artist, Murphy had two hit singles, "Party All the Time" (which was produced by Rick James) and "Put Your Mouth on Me" in the mid-1980s (although he actually started singing earlier in his career, with the songs "Boogie In Your Butt" and "Enough Is Enough", the latter being a parody of Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer's 1979 song, "No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)". They both appear on his 1982 self-titled comedy album.) "Party All the Time" was featured on Murphy's 1985 debut album ''How Could It Be'', which included a minor follow-up R&B; hit in the title track, a duet with vocalist Crystal Blake. This track was written by Rusty Hamilton and was produced by Stevie Wonder's cousin Aquil Fudge after a brief falling out and bet with Rick James. In 2004, VH-1 and ''Blender'' voted "Party All the Time" number seven among the "50 Worst Songs of All-Time." Sharam used a sample of the song for the UK #8 hit "PATT (Party All The Time)" in 2006.

Murphy recorded the album ''Love's Alright'' in the early 1990s. He performed in a music video of the single "Whatzupwitu", featuring Michael Jackson. He recorded a duet with Shabba Ranks called "I Was a King". In 1992, Murphy appeared in Michael Jackson's "Remember the Time" video alongside Magic Johnson and Iman.

Though uncredited, Murphy provided vocal work on ''SNL'' castmate Joe Piscopo's comedy single, "The Honeymooners Rap." Piscopo impersonated Jackie Gleason on the single, while Murphy provided an imitation of Art Carney.

In ''Coming to America'', he imitated Jackie Wilson when he sang "To Be Loved", but because the character he was playing had a thick accent, he had to sing it in character. In later years, Murphy performed several songs in the ''Shrek'' film franchise. In the first film, he performed a version of "I'm a Believer" in the film's final scene; in ''Shrek 2'' he performed Ricky Martin's hit "Livin' La Vida Loca" along with co-star Antonio Banderas.

Murphy's all-time favorite singer is Elvis Presley.

Career slump

From 1989 until the mid 1990s, box office results for Murphy's films dropped, hitting a low point with the critically panned ''Beverly Hills Cop III'' (1994), a movie Murphy would ultimately denounce during an appearance on ''Inside the Actors Studio'', although he did find minor box office success with ''''Boomerang'''', ''Another 48 Hrs.'' and ''Vampire In Brooklyn''. ''Harlem Nights'' featured Murphy, who had previously been known only as a performer, as director, producer, star, and co-writer, with his brother, Charlie Murphy, as well as supporting roles for Murphy's comic idols Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor.

During this period Murphy was criticized by filmmaker Spike Lee for not using his show business stature to help black actors break into film, despite Murphy's films (especially those he produced) often being populated with predominately black casts (''Coming To America, Harlem Nights, Boomerang, Vampire In Brooklyn, Life''). Many black actors who would later gain wider recognition make early appearances in Murphy films such as Damon Wayans in ''Beverly Hills Cop'', Halle Berry and Martin Lawrence in ''Boomerang'', Samuel L. Jackson and Cuba Gooding Jr. in ''Coming to America,'' Dave Chappelle in ''The Nutty Professor'' and Chris Rock in ''Beverly Hills Cop II''.

Although Murphy has enjoyed commercial success since ''Saturday Night Live'', he has never attended cast reunions or anniversary specials, nor did he participate in the making of the ''Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live'' retrospective book by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller (2002).

Comeback and image makeover

Murphy's box office results began to recover in 1996, starting with ''The Nutty Professor''. He followed with a series of very successful family-friendly movies like ''Mulan'', ''Dr. Dolittle'' and its sequel, the ''Shrek'' series, ''Daddy Day Care'', and ''The Haunted Mansion'', along with ''Nutty Professor II: The Klumps''. However, most of his movies meant for more adult audiences performed moderately; ''Metro'', ''I Spy'', and ''Showtime'' all ended to gross less than $40 million domestically, ''Holy Man'' performed poorly, grossing less than $13 million, and ''The Adventures of Pluto Nash'' is on record as one of the biggest theatrical money-losers of all time, grossing just $7 million worldwide on a reported $110 million budget. A notable exception to this run of poorly received adult-themed films was the Frank Oz comedy ''Bowfinger'', also starring Steve Martin. The film garnered generally positive critical reviews, and grossed $66 million at the box office.

In 2006, he starred in the motion picture version of the Broadway musical ''Dreamgirls'' as soul singer James "Thunder" Early. Murphy won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor, as well as a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Broadcast Film Critics Association Award in that category. Several reviews for the film highlighted Murphy's performance while he received some pre-release Academy Awards buzz. Murphy was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor on January 23, 2007, but lost to Alan Arkin for his performance in ''Little Miss Sunshine''. ''Dreamgirls'' was the first film distributed by Paramount Pictures to star Murphy (who once was on an exclusive contract with the studio) since ''Vampire in Brooklyn'' in 1995.

In 2007, Murphy was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. As a result of Viacom's acquisition of Dreamworks SKG, Paramount distributed his other 2007 releases: ''Norbit'' and ''Shrek the Third''. He starred in the 2008 film ''Meet Dave'' and the 2009 film ''Imagine That'' for Paramount Pictures.

Murphy will also co-star in ''Tower Heist'', Brett Ratner's heist movie. Murphy stars as part of a group of hardworking men who find out they have fallen victim to a wealthy business man's Ponzi scheme, and conspire to rob his high-rise residence. Ben Stiller, Matthew Broderick, and Casey Affleck are also starring in the film. Brian Grazer is producing the picture for his Imagine Entertainment shingle, and will be distributed by Universal Pictures on November 4, 2011.

Personal life

Family

Murphy has been married twice (second one not legal) and has a total of eight children:

Murphy's first and oldest child was by Paulette McNeely: son Eric Murphy (born on 10 July 1989). He also has a child by Tamara Hood: son Christian Murphy (born on 29 November 1990).

Murphy began a longtime romantic relationship with Nicole Mitchell (born January 5, 1968) after meeting her in 1988 at an NAACP Image Awards show. They lived together for almost two years before getting married at the Grand Ballroom of The Plaza Hotel in New York City on March 18, 1993. Murphy and Mitchell had five children together: Bria L. Murphy (born November 18, 1989), Myles Mitchell (born November 7, 1992), Shayne Audra (born October 10, 1994), Zola Ivy (born December 24, 1999) and Bella Zahra (born January 29, 2002). In August 2005, Mitchell filed for divorce, citing "irreconcilable differences". The divorce was finalized on April 17, 2006.

The Murphy family currently resides in Long Island, New York.

Following his divorce from Mitchell, in 2006, Murphy began dating former Spice Girl Melanie B, who became pregnant and stated that the child was Murphy's. When questioned about the pregnancy in December 2006 by ''RTL Boulevard,'' Murphy told Dutch reporter Matthijs Kleyn, "I don't know whose child that is until it comes out and has a blood test. You shouldn't jump to conclusions, sir". Brown gave birth to a baby girl, Angel Iris Murphy Brown, on Murphy's 46th birthday, April 3, 2007. On June 22, 2007, representatives for Brown announced in ''People'' that a DNA test had confirmed that Murphy was the father. Brown has stated in an interview that Murphy has not sought a relationship with Angel.

Murphy exchanged marriage vows with film producer Tracey Edmonds, former wife of Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds, on January 1, 2008, in a private ceremony on an island off Bora Bora. It was announced on January 16, 2008, that they never legally wed, had decided to forgo legalizing their union, and had instead chosen to remain friends.

Legal problems

According to Murphy's childhood friend Harris Haith in his book, ''Growing Up Laughing With Eddie'', long before Murphy did any writing for ''Coming to America'', Art Buchwald had approached Paramount Pictures with the idea for a similar film. His material was rejected, but the information was retained by Paramount. They liked Buchwald's idea but did not see fit to pay him and saved it for use later down the road. Some years later, Paramount presented the idea of ''Coming to America'' to Eddie and gave him the contract. Murphy wrote a screenplay that came to light exactly as it aired on the silver screen. In 1988, Buchwald sued Murphy and Paramount Pictures, but Murphy was not found liable because Paramount had received the material.

In May 1997, Murphy was stopped by police with a transvestite prostitute in his car shortly before the release of ''Holy Man'', causing him a number of public relations problems.

Charitable work

Murphy has donated money to the AIDS Foundation, and cancer, education, creative arts, family/parent support, health and homeless charities. He has donated to the Martin Luther King Jr. Center, various cancer charities and $100,000 to the Screen Actors' Guild's strike relief fund.

Filmography

''Trading Places'' ''Eddie Murphy Delirious'' ''Best Defense'' ''The Golden Child'' ''Beverly Hills Cop II'' ''Coming to America'' ''Harlem Nights'' ''Another 48 Hrs.'' ''Boomerang (1992 film) ''Beverly Hills Cop III'' ''Vampire in Brooklyn'' ''The Nutty Professor (1996 film) ''Metro (1997 film) ''Mulan (1998 film) ''Life (film) ''Nutty Professor II: The Klumps'' ''Shrek'' ''Showtime (film) ''Daddy Day Care'' ''Shrek 2'' ''Dreamgirls (film) ''Norbit'' Donkey (Shrek) ''Meet Dave'' ''Imagine That (film) ''Shrek Forever After'' ''Tower Heist''

colspan=4 style="background:#B0C4DE;"	Film
Year	Title	Role	Notes
1982	''48 Hrs.''	Reggie Hammond
1983	|	Billy Ray Valentine	Nominated – Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
1983	|	Himself	Also Producer
rowspan="2"	1984	|	Lieutenant T.M. Landry
''Beverly Hills Cop''	Axel Foley>Det. Axel Foley
1986	|	Chandler Jarrell
rowspan="2"	1987	|	Axel Foley>Det. Axel Foley
''Eddie Murphy Raw''	Himself
1988	|	Prince Akeem/Clarence/Randy Watson/Saul
1989	|	Quick (real name Vernest Brown)	Also Director and Writer
1990	|	Reggie Hammond
rowspan="2"	1992	Boomerang'' ||	Marcus Graham
''The Distinguished Gentleman''	Thomas Jefferson Johnson
1994	|	Axel Foley>Det. Axel Foley
1995	|	Maximillian/Preacher Pauly/Guido	Also Producer
1996	The Nutty Professor'' ||	Professor Sherman Klump/Buddy Love/ Lance Perkins/Cletus 'Papa' Klump/ Anna Pearl 'Mama' Jensen Klump/ Ida Mae 'Granny' Jensen/Ernie Klump, Sr.	Also Producer Saturn Award for Best Actor National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actor Nominated – Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy Nominated – NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture Nominated – Satellite Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
1997	Metro'' ||	Insp. Scott Roper
rowspan="3"	1998	Mulan'' ||	Mushu	(voice)
''Dr. Dolittle (film)	Doctor Dolittle''	Doctor Dolittle>Dr. John Dolittle
''Holy Man''	G
rowspan="2"	1999	Life'' ||	Rayford "Ray" Gibson	Also Producer
''Bowfinger''	Kit Ramsey/Jeffernson 'Jiff' Ramsey
2000	|	Professor Sherman Klump/Buddy Love/ Lance Perkins/Cletus 'Papa' Klump/ Anna Pearl 'Mama' Jensen Klump/ Ida Mae 'Granny' Jensen/Ernie Klump	Also Producer Nominated – Satellite Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
rowspan="2"	2001	|	Donkey (Shrek)>Donkey	(voice) Annie Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement for Voice Acting by a Male Performer in an Animated Feature Production Nominated – BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role Nominated – Black Reel Award: Best Supporting Actor
''Dr. Dolittle 2''	Doctor Dolittle>Dr. John Dolittle
rowspan="3"	2002	Showtime'' ||	Officer Trey Sellers
''The Adventures of Pluto Nash''	Pluto Nash/Rex Crater
''I Spy (film)	I Spy''	Kelly Robinson
rowspan="2"	2003	|	Charles "Charlie" Hinton
''The Haunted Mansion (film)	The Haunted Mansion''	Jim Evers
2004	|	Donkey (Shrek)>Donkey	(voice)
2006	Dreamgirls'' ||	Dreamgirls (film)#Cast>James 'Thunder' Early	Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actor Central Ohio Film Critics Association for Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role Nominated – Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor Nominated – Black Reel Award: Best Supporting Actor Nominated – Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actor Nominated – NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture Nominated – Online Film Critics Society Award for Best Supporting Actor Nominated – Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor Nominated – Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture
rowspan="2"	2007	|	Norbit Rice/Rasputia Latimore-Rice/Mr. Wong	Also Producer
''Shrek the Third''	Donkey ||(voice)Kids' Choice Award for Favorite Voice from an Animated Movie
2008	|	Starship Dave Ming-Chang (Spacecraft), Captain
2009	Imagine That'' ||	Evan Danielson
2010	|	Donkey (Shrek)>Donkey	2011 Kids' Choice Awards>Kids' Choice Award for Favorite Voice from an Animated Movie
2011	|	Leo "Slide" Dalphael

Television

''Eddie Murphy Delirious ''What's Alan Watching?'' ''Dangerous - The Short Films'' ''The PJs'' ''Shrek the Halls'' ''Donkey's Christmas Shrektacular''

colspan=4 style="background:#B0C4DE;"	Television
Year	Title	Role	Notes
1980–1984	''Saturday Night Live''
1983	Eddie Murphy: Delirious'' ||
1989	|
1993	|	Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh	Remember the Time music video
1999–2001	|	Thurgood Stubbs	Voice Nominated – Annie Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement for Voice Acting in an Animated Television Production (1999) Nominated – Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program (for Programming Less Than One Hour) (1999)
2007	|	Donkey (Shrek)>Donkey	TV special Voice Nominated – Annie Award for Best Voice Acting in an Animated Television Production
2010	|	Donkey (Shrek)>Donkey	TV special Voice

Discography

Studio albums

Year	Album details	Peak chartpositions
		! width="40"	! width="40"
1982	align="left"	* Release date: 1982	* Label: CBS Records	97	—
1983	align="left"	* Release date: 1983	* Label: CBS Records	35	10
1985		* Release date: 1985	* Label: CBS Records	26	17
1989		* Release date: 1989	* Label: CBS Records	70	22
1993		* Release date: February 23, 1993	* Label: Motown Records	—	80

Compilation albums

! Year	! Album details
1997	''Greatest Comedy Hits''	* Release date: May 27, 1997	* Label: Columbia Records
1998	''All I Fuckin' Know''	* Release date: April 28, 1998	* Label: Sony BMG

Singles

Year	Single	Peak chart positions					Album
		! width="35"	! width="35"	! width="35"	! width="35"	! width="35"
1982		—	56	—	—	—
		2	8	19	3	87
	—	63	—	—	—
		27	2	—	—	—
	—	75	—	—	—
		—	61	—	—	64
	—	74	—	—	—
	—	—	—	—	—

Awards/nominations

style="background:#B0C4DE;"	Award	Year	Category	Work	Outcome
Academy Awards	2007			Nominated
	1999	Outstanding Individual Achievement for Voice Acting in an Animated Television Production	''The PJs''	Nominated
2001	Outstanding Individual Achievement for Voice Acting by a Male Performer in an Animated Feature Production	''Shrek''	Won
2008	Best Voice Acting in an Animated Television Production	''Shrek the Halls''	Nominated
BAFTA Awards	2002		''Shrek''	Nominated
	2000	Best Actor in a Motion Picture	''Bowfinger''	Nominated
2002		''Shrek''	Nominated
2007		Nominated
Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards	2007			Won
Central Ohio Film Critics Association	2007	Best Supporting Actor		Won
Chicago Film Critics Association Awards	2007			Nominated
rowspan=4	1983	Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy, Variety or Music Series	''Saturday Night Live''	Nominated
	Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program	''Saturday Night Live''	Nominated
	''Saturday Night Live''	Nominated
1999		''The PJs''"He's Gotta Have It"	Nominated
	1983		''48 Hrs.''
1984		''Trading Places''
1997
1985		''Beverly Hills Cop''
2007		Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture>Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture		Won
	2005	Best Voice from an Animated Film	''Shrek 2''	Nominated
2008	Best Voice from an Animated Film	''Shrek the Third''	Won
2011	Best Voice from an Animated Film	''Shrek Forever After''	Won
	1997	Outstanding Lead Actor in a Motion Picture		Nominated
2007	Actor in a Supporting Role		Nominated
National Society of Film Critics Awards	1997			Won
Online Film Critics Society Awards	2007			Nominated
	1996	rowspan=2
2001	''Nutty Professor II: The Klumps''
	1997			Won
2002		''Shrek''	Nominated
			rowspan=2	Won
	Nominated

References

External links

Eddie Murphy on Discogs

Maxim Rated Top SNL performer

Category:1961 births Category:20th-century actors Category:21st-century actors Category:American stand-up comedians Category:American voice actors Category:Actors from New York City Category:African American film actors Category:African American comedians Category:African American singers Category:African American television actors Category:American impressionists (entertainers) Category:American screenwriters Category:American video game actors Category:Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe (film) winners Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Living people Category:People from Bushwick, Brooklyn Category:People from Nassau County, New York Category:Saturn Award winners Category:Annie Award winners

ar:إيدي ميرفي an:Eddie Murphy az:Eddi Mörfi bs:Eddie Murphy bg:Еди Мърфи ca:Eddie Murphy cs:Eddie Murphy cy:Eddie Murphy da:Eddie Murphy de:Eddie Murphy et:Eddie Murphy es:Eddie Murphy eo:Eddie Murphy fa:ادی مورفی fr:Eddie Murphy ga:Eddie Murphy ko:에디 머피 hi:एडी मर्फी hr:Eddie Murphy io:Eddie Murphy id:Eddie Murphy it:Eddie Murphy he:אדי מרפי jv:Eddie Murphy ka:ედი მერფი sw:Eddie Murphy lv:Edijs Mērfijs hu:Eddie Murphy arz:إدي ميرفى nah:Eddie Murphy nl:Eddie Murphy (acteur) ja:エディ・マーフィ no:Eddie Murphy nn:Eddie Murphy oc:Eddie Murphy pl:Eddie Murphy pt:Eddie Murphy ro:Eddie Murphy ru:Мёрфи, Эдди sq:Eddie Murphy simple:Eddie Murphy srn:Eddie Murphy sr:Еди Мерфи sh:Eddie Murphy fi:Eddie Murphy sv:Eddie Murphy tl:Eddie Murphy tt:Эдди Мерфи te:ఎడీ మర్ఫీ th:เอ็ดดี้ เมอร์ฟี tr:Eddie Murphy uk:Едді Мерфі zh:艾迪·墨菲

name	Butterfly Boucher
background	solo_singer
born	June 02, 1979Australia
instrument	Vocals, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, piano, tambourine
occupation	Musician, songwriter, producer, arranger
years active	2003–present
label	Universal (UK)A&M; (US)
associated acts	Ten Out of Tenn
website
notable instruments	}}

Butterfly Boucher () (born 2 June 1979) is an Australian singer-songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. She has released two albums, ''Flutterby'' (2003) and ''Scary Fragile'' (2009).

Biography

Boucher was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1979 and is the middle child of seven daughters. The name "Butterfly" was a suggestion from a friend of the family. In later years, Butterfly's sister Becca Boucher had a band, Eat the Menu (later renamed The Mercy Bell), in which Butterfly played bass guitar. Her debut album, ''Flutterby'', was released in 2003. Boucher toured the United States and Europe, opening for Barenaked Ladies, and later for Sarah McLachlan on her ''Afterglow'' arena tour.

Boucher released her first single of the album, "I Can't Make Me," in the UK first and later released "Another White Dash."

A second album, ''Scary Fragile'', was released on 2 June 2009. The single "A Bitter Song" from the album, first featured on an episode of the television series ''Grey's Anatomy'', was released as an iTunes download on 27 February.

Boucher currently resides in the United States in Nashville, Tennessee, and is part of the musical group Ten Out of Tenn. In 2011, she toured with Sarah McLachlan, playing bass and singing vocals. She is producing Missy Higgins' third album. She is also performing and recording with Elle Macho, a Nashville based trio with David Mead and Lindsay Jamieson.

Discography

Albums

''Flutterby'' (2003)

''Scary Fragile'' (2009)

Singles and EPs

"I Can't Make Me" (2003)

"Another White Dash" (2004)

Collaborations and guest performances

''For the Kids Too!'' (with Gerry Holmes) 2004-10-19

''Too late, Farewell'' (with Delerium) on ''Voices'' 2010-10-5

''Es Potencial'' (with Elle Macho 2010-7-4

Works featuring Butterfly Boucher

Boucher recorded a duet, with David Bowie singing his song "Changes", for the soundtrack of the film ''Shrek 2'', released in May 2004.

Boucher's own songs have also been featured on various television programs. From ''Flutterby'', "Never Leave Your Heart Alone" was used in the third-to-last episode of British teen program ''As If''. Short-lived ABC series ''The Days'' used "Life is Short" as its opening theme.

Fantasy television series ''Charmed'' also featured songs from ''Flutterby''. "Life is Short" was used in the episode "Spin City", and the episode Show Ghouls features a version of Flutterby song "I Can't Make Me" remixed by Chris Lord-Alge, which is later included in soundtrack album ''Charmed: The Book of Shadows''.

Hit television series ''Grey's Anatomy'' later featured both "Never Leave Your Heart Alone" and "Life is Short" in its first season in 2005, and debuted "A Bitter Song" from the yet-unreleased album ''Scary Fragile'' in the third season episode "Drowning On Dry Land" in 2007.

Boucher harmonizes on the song "Not Enough Night," by David Poe.

"Life Is Short" was also featured in an episode of the short-lived series ''Wonderfalls''.

She also played the drums on Mat Kearney's song "Breathe In, Breathe Out".

She also co-wrote several songs and appears on Dawson Wells debut album ''Re: No Subject'', for which she played several instruments, including drums, guitar, piano and other keyboards, tambourine and bass. She provided lead and backup vocals on most of the songs, including a duet with Dawson called "Gracey and Henry Martin's First Summer". Compositions she penned with Wells on that album are "Say Anything", "Silly One", "Being In Love". An accomplished arranger and producer, Boucher co-produced this album with Dawson Wells.

She harmonizes on the songs "Human Nature" and "One Plus One" on David Mead's album ''Indiana''.

She also appears in a duet with K.S. Rhodes on YouTube, performing his song "Dead Language" on a video for Flipside Highway.

Her music was featured on "Channel 1 News" a national school news broadcast.

An American TV commercial for Endless.Com used "For the Love of Love" as its music track in late 2009. Butterfly Boucher performed and was interviewed on BETA Records TV.

References

External links

Official site

MySpace page

Interview with Butterfly at WickedInfo.com

Butterfly Boucher on Channel One News

Category:1979 births Category:Living people Category:Australian pop singers Category:Australian singer-songwriters

de:Butterfly Boucher fr:Butterfly Boucher hu:Butterfly Boucher nl:Butterfly Boucher pt:Butterfly Boucher sv:Butterfly Boucher

name	David Bowie
background	solo_singer
birth name	David Robert Jones
birth date	January 08, 1947
birth place	Brixton, London, England
occupation	Musician, singer-songwriter,record producer, actor
years active	1964–present
instrument
genre	Rock, glam rock, art rock, pop
associated acts	The Riot Squad, Tin Machine
label	Deram, RCA, Virgin, EMI, ISO, Columbia, BMG, Pye
website	davidbowie.com }}

David Bowie ( ; born David Robert Jones on 8 January 1947) is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s, and is known for his distinctive voice and the intellectual depth of his work.

Bowie first caught the eye and ear of the public in July 1969, when his song "Space Oddity" reached the top five of the UK Singles Chart. After a three-year period of experimentation he re-emerged in 1972 during the glam rock era with the flamboyant, androgynous alter ego Ziggy Stardust, spearheaded by the hit single "Starman" and the album ''The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars''. Bowie's impact at that time, as described by biographer David Buckley, "challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture." The relatively short-lived Ziggy persona proved merely one facet of a career marked by continual reinvention, musical innovation and striking visual presentation.

In 1975, Bowie achieved his first major American crossover success with the number-one single "Fame" and the hit album ''Young Americans'', which the singer characterised as "plastic soul". The sound constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated many of his UK devotees. He then confounded the expectations of both his record label and his American audiences by recording the minimalist album ''Low'' (1977)—the first of three collaborations with Brian Eno over the next two years. The so-called "Berlin Trilogy" albums all reached the UK top five and garnered lasting critical praise.

After uneven commercial success in the late 1970s, Bowie had UK number ones with the 1980 single "Ashes to Ashes" and its parent album, ''Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)''. He paired with Queen for the 1981 UK chart-topping single "Under Pressure", then reached a new commercial peak in 1983 with the album ''Let's Dance'', which yielded the hit singles "Let's Dance", "China Girl", and "Modern Love". Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Bowie continued to experiment with musical styles, including blue-eyed soul, industrial, adult contemporary, and jungle. His last recorded album was ''Reality'' (2003), which was supported by the 2003–2004 Reality Tour.

Biographer David Buckley says of Bowie: "His influence has been unique in popular culture—he has permeated and altered more lives than any comparable figure." In the BBC's 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, Bowie was placed at number 29. Throughout his career, he has sold an estimated 140 million albums. In the United Kingdom, he has been awarded nine Platinum album certifications, 11 Gold and eight Silver, and in the United States, five Platinum and seven Gold certifications. In 2004, ''Rolling Stone'' ranked him 39th on their list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time", and 23rd on their list of the best singers of all-time.

History

1947–62: early years

David Bowie was born David Robert Jones in Brixton, London, on 8 January 1947. His mother, Margaret Mary "Peggy" (née Burns), of Irish descent, worked as a cinema usherette, while his father, Haywood Stenton "John" Jones, was a promotions officer for Barnardo's. The family lived at 40 Stansfield Road, located near the border of the south London areas of Brixton and Stockwell. A neighbour recalled that "London in the forties was the worst possible place, and the worst possible time for a child to grow up in." Bowie attended Stockwell Infants School until he was six years old, acquiring a reputation as a gifted and single-minded child—and a defiant brawler.

In 1953 the family moved to the suburb of Bromley, where, two years later, Bowie progressed to Burnt Ash Junior School. His singing voice was considered "adequate" by the school choir, and his recorder playing judged to demonstrate above-average musical ability. At the age of nine, his dancing during the newly introduced music and movement classes was strikingly imaginative: teachers called his interpretations "vividly artistic" and his poise "astonishing" for a child. The same year, his interest in music was further stimulated when his father brought home a collection of American 45s by artists including Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, The Platters, Fats Domino, Elvis Presley and Little Richard. Upon listening to "Tutti Frutti", Bowie would later say, "I had heard God". Presley's impact on him was likewise emphatic: "I saw a cousin of mine dance to ... 'Hound Dog' and I had never seen her get up and be moved so much by anything. It really impressed me, the power of the music. I started getting records immediately after that." By the end of the following year he had taken up the ukelele and tea-chest bass and begun to participate in skiffle sessions with friends, and had started to play the piano; meanwhile his stage presentation of numbers by both Presley and Chuck Berry—complete with gyrations in tribute to the original artists—to his local Wolf Cub group was described as "mesmerizing ... like someone from another planet." Failing his eleven plus exam at the conclusion of his Burnt Ash Junior education, Bowie joined Bromley Technical High School.

It was an unusual technical school, as biographer Christopher Sandford writes:

Bowie studied art, music, and design, including layout and typesetting. After Terry Burns, his half-brother, introduced him to modern jazz, his enthusiasm for players like Charles Mingus and John Coltrane led his mother to give him a plastic alto saxophone in 1961; he was soon receiving lessons from a local musician. He received a serious injury at school in 1962 when his friend George Underwood, wearing a ring on his finger, punched him in the left eye during a fight over a girl. Doctors feared he would lose the sight of the eye, and he was forced to stay out of school for a series of operations during a four-month hospitalisation. The damage could not be fully repaired, leaving him with faulty depth perception and a permanently dilated pupil (the latter producing Bowie's appearance of having different coloured eyes, though each iris has the same blue colour). Despite their fisticuffs, Underwood and Bowie remained good friends, and Underwood went on to create the artwork for Bowie's early albums.

1962–68: the Konrads to the Riot Squad

Graduating from his plastic saxophone to a real instrument in 1962, Bowie formed his first band at the age of 15. Playing guitar-based rock and roll at local youth gatherings and weddings, the Konrads had a varying line-up of between four and eight members, Underwood among them. When Bowie left the technical school the following year, he informed his parents of his intention to become a pop star. His mother promptly arranged his employment as an electrician's mate. Frustrated by his band-mates' limited aspirations, Bowie left the Konrads and joined another band, the King Bees. He wrote to the newly successful washing-machine entrepreneur John Bloom inviting him to "do for us what Brian Epstein has done for the Beatles—and make another million." Bloom did not respond to the offer, but his referral to Dick James's partner Leslie Conn led to Bowie's first personal management contract.

Conn quickly began to promote Bowie. The singer's debut single, "Liza Jane", credited to Davie Jones and the King Bees, had no commercial success. Dissatisfied with the King Bees and their repertoire of Howlin' Wolf and Willie Dixon blues numbers, Bowie quit the band less than a month later to join the Manish Boys, another blues outfit, who incorporated folk and soul — "I used to dream of being their Mick Jagger", Bowie was to recall. "I Pity the Fool" was no more successful than "Liza Jane", and Bowie soon moved on again to join the Lower Third, a blues trio strongly influenced by The Who. "You've Got a Habit of Leaving" fared no better, signalling the end of Conn's contract. Declaring that he would exit the pop world "to study mime at Sadler's Wells", Bowie nevertheless remained with the Lower Third. His new manager, Ralph Horton, later instrumental in his transition to solo artist, soon witnessed Bowie's move to yet another group, the Buzz, yielding the singer's fifth unsuccessful single release, "Do Anything You Say". While with the Buzz, Bowie also joined the Riot Squad; their recordings, which included a Bowie number and Velvet Underground material, went unreleased. Ken Pitt, introduced by Horton, took over as Bowie's manager.

Dissatisfied with his stage name as Davy (and Davie) Jones, which in the mid-1960s invited confusion with Davy Jones of The Monkees, Bowie re-named himself after the 19th century American frontiersman Jim Bowie and the knife he had popularised. His April 1967 solo single, "The Laughing Gnome", utilising sped-up Chipmunk-style vocals, failed to chart. Released six weeks later, his album debut, ''David Bowie'', an amalgam of pop, psychedelia, and music hall, met the same fate. It would be his last release for two years.

Bowie's fascination with the bizarre was fuelled when he met dancer Lindsay Kemp: "He lived on his emotions, he was a wonderful influence. His day-to-day life was the most theatrical thing I had ever seen, ever. It was everything I thought Bohemia probably was. I joined the circus." Kemp, for his part, recalled, "I didn't really teach him to be a mime artiste but to be more of himself on the outside, ... I enabled him to free the angel and demon that he is on the inside." Studying the dramatic arts under Kemp, from avant-garde theatre and mime to commedia dell'arte, Bowie became immersed in the creation of personae to present to the world. Satirising life in a British prison, meanwhile, the Bowie-penned "Over the Wall We Go" became a 1967 single for Oscar; another Bowie composition, "Silly Boy Blue", was released by Billy Fury the following year. After Kemp cast Bowie with Hermione Farthingale for a poetic minuet, the pair began dating; they soon moved into a London flat together. Playing acoustic guitar, she formed a group with Bowie and bassist John Hutchinson; between September 1968 and early 1969, when Bowie and Farthingale broke up, the trio gave a small number of concerts combining folk, Merseybeat, poetry and mime.

1969–73: psychedelic folk to glam rock

''Space Oddity'' to ''Hunky Dory''

Because of his lack of commercial success, Bowie was forced to try to earn a living in different ways. He featured in a Lyons Maid ice cream commercial, but was rejected for another by Kit Kat. Intended as a vehicle to promote the singer, a 30-minute film featuring performances from his repertoire, ''Love You till Tuesday'', was made. Although not released until 1984, the filming sessions in January 1969 led to unexpected success when Bowie told the producers, "That film of yours—I've got a new song for it." He then demoed the song that would provide his commercial breakthrough. "Space Oddity" was released later in the year to coincide with the first moon landing. Breaking up with Farthingale shortly after completion of the film, Bowie moved in with Mary Finnigan as her lodger. Continuing the divergence from rock and roll and blues begun by his work with Farthingale, Bowie joined forces with Finnigan, Christina Ostrom and Barrie Jackson to run a folk club on Sunday nights at the Three Tuns pub in Beckenham High Street. This soon morphed into the Beckenham Arts Lab, and became extremely popular. The Arts Lab hosted a free festival in a local park, later immortalised by Bowie in his song "Memory of a Free Festival". "Space Oddity" was released on 11 July, five days ahead of the Apollo 11 launch, to become a UK top five hit. Bowie's second album, ''Space Oddity'', followed in November; originally issued in the UK as ''David Bowie'', it caused some confusion with its predecessor of the same name, and the early US release was instead titled ''Man of Words/Man of Music''. Featuring philosophical post-hippie lyrics on peace, love and morality, its acoustic folk rock occasionally fortified by harder rock, the album was not a commercial success at the time of its release.

Bowie met Angela Barnett in April 1969. They would marry within a year. Her impact on him was immediate, and her involvement in his career far-reaching, leaving Pitt with limited influence. Having established himself as a solo artist with "Space Oddity", Bowie now began to sense a lack: "a full-time band for gigs and recording—people he could relate to personally". The shortcoming was underlined by his artistic rivalry with Marc Bolan, who was at the time acting as his session guitarist. A band was duly assembled. John Cambridge, a drummer Bowie met at the Arts Lab, was joined by Tony Visconti on bass and Mick Ronson on electric guitar. After a brief and disastrous manifestation as the Hype, the group reverted to a configuration presenting Bowie as a solo artist. Their initial studio work was marred by a heated disagreement between Bowie and Cambridge over the latter's drumming style; matters came to a head when Bowie, enraged, accused, "You're fucking up my album." Cambridge summarily quit and was replaced by Mick Woodmansey. Not long after, in a move that would result in years of litigation, at the conclusion of which Bowie would be forced to pay Pitt compensation, the singer fired his manager, replacing him with Tony Defries.

The studio sessions continued and resulted in Bowie's third album, ''The Man Who Sold the World'' (1970). Characterised by the heavy rock sound of his new backing band, it was a marked departure from the acoustic guitar and folk rock style established by ''Space Oddity''. To promote it in the United States, Mercury Records financed a coast-to-coast publicity tour in which Bowie, between January and February 1971, was interviewed by radio stations and the media. Exploiting his androgynous appearance, the original cover of the UK version unveiled two months later would depict the singer wearing a dress: taking the garment with him, he wore it during interviews—to the approval of critics, including ''Rolling Stone''s John Mendelsohn who described him as "ravishing, almost disconcertingly reminiscent of Lauren Bacall"—and in the street, to mixed reaction including laughter and, in the case of one male pedestrian, producing a gun and telling Bowie to "kiss my ass". During the tour Bowie's observation of two seminal American proto-punk artists led him to develop a concept that would eventually find form in the Ziggy Stardust character: a melding of the persona of Iggy Pop with the music of Lou Reed, producing "the ultimate pop idol". A girlfriend recalled his "scrawling notes on a cocktail napkin about a crazy rock star named Iggy or Ziggy", and on his return to England he declared his intention to create a character "who looks like he's landed from Mars".

''Hunky Dory'' (1971) found Visconti, Bowie's producer and bassist, supplanted in both roles, by Ken Scott and Trevor Bolder respectively. The album saw the partial return of the fey pop singer of "Space Oddity", with light fare such as "Kooks", a song written for his son, Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones, born on 30 May. (His parents chose "his kooky name"—he would be known as Zowie for the next 12 years—after the Greek word ''zoe'', life.) Elsewhere, the album explored more serious themes, and found Bowie paying unusually direct homage to his influences with "Song for Bob Dylan", "Andy Warhol", and "Queen Bitch", a Velvet Underground pastiche. It was not a significant commercial success at the time.

''Ziggy Stardust''

With his next venture, Bowie, in the words of biographer David Buckley, "challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day" and "created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture". Dressed in a striking costume, his hair dyed red, Bowie launched his Ziggy Stardust stage show with the Spiders from Mars—Ronson, Bolder and Woodmansey—at the Toby Jug pub in Tolworth on 10 February 1972. The show was hugely popular, catapulting him to stardom as he toured the UK over the course of the next six months and creating, as described by Buckley, a "cult of Bowie" that was "unique—its influence lasted longer and has been more creative than perhaps almost any other force within pop fandom." ''The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars'' (1972), combining the hard rock elements of ''The Man Who Sold the World'' with the lighter experimental rock and pop of ''Hunky Dory'', was released in June. "Starman", issued as an April single ahead of the album, was to cement Bowie's UK breakthrough: both single and album charted rapidly following his July ''Top of the Pops'' performance of the song. The album, which would remain in the chart for two years, was soon joined there by the six-month-old ''Hunky Dory''. At the same time the non-album single "John, I’m Only Dancing", and "All the Young Dudes", a song he wrote and produced for Mott the Hoople, became UK hits. The Ziggy Stardust Tour continued to the United States.

Bowie contributed backing vocals to Lou Reed's 1972 solo breakthrough ''Transformer'', co-producing the album with Mick Ronson. His own ''Aladdin Sane'' (1973) topped the UK chart, his first number one album. Described by Bowie as "Ziggy goes to America", it contained songs he wrote while travelling to and across the United States during the earlier part of the Ziggy tour, which now continued to Japan to promote the new album. ''Aladdin Sane'' spawned the UK top five singles "The Jean Genie" and "Drive-In Saturday".

Bowie's love of acting led his total immersion in the characters he created for his music. "Offstage I'm a robot. Onstage I achieve emotion. It's probably why I prefer dressing up as Ziggy to being David." With satisfaction came severe personal difficulties: acting the same role over an extended period, it became impossible for him to separate Ziggy Stardust—and, later, the Thin White Duke—from his own character offstage. Ziggy, Bowie said, "wouldn't leave me alone for years. That was when it all started to go sour ... My whole personality was affected. It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity." His later Ziggy shows, which included songs from both ''Ziggy Stardust'' and ''Aladdin Sane'', were ultra-theatrical affairs filled with shocking stage moments, such as Bowie stripping down to a sumo wrestling loincloth or simulating oral sex with Ronson's guitar. Bowie toured and gave press conferences as Ziggy before a dramatic and abrupt on-stage "retirement" at London's Hammersmith Odeon on 3 July 1973. Footage from the final show was released in 1983 for the film ''Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars''.

After breaking up the Spiders from Mars, Bowie attempted to move on from his Ziggy persona. His back catalogue was now highly sought: ''The Man Who Sold the World'' had been re-released in 1972 along with ''Space Oddity''. "Life on Mars?", from ''Hunky Dory'', was released in June 1973 and made number three in the UK singles chart. Entering the same chart in September, Bowie's novelty record from 1967, "The Laughing Gnome", would reach number four. ''Pin Ups'', a collection of covers of his 1960s favourites, followed in October, producing a UK number three hit in "Sorrow" and itself peaking at number one, making David Bowie the best-selling act of 1973 in the UK. It brought the total number of Bowie albums currently in the UK chart to six.

1974–1976: Soul, funk and the Thin White Duke

Bowie moved to the United States in 1974, initially staying in New York City before settling in Los Angeles. ''Diamond Dogs'' (1974), parts of which found him heading towards soul and funk, was the product of two distinct ideas: a musical based on a wild future in a post-apocalyptic city, and setting George Orwell's ''1984'' to music. The album went to number one in the UK, spawning the hits "Rebel Rebel" and "Diamond Dogs", and number five in the US. To promote it, Bowie launched the Diamond Dogs Tour, visiting cities in North America between June and December 1974. Choreographed by Toni Basil, and lavishly produced with theatrical special effects, the high-budget stage production was filmed by Alan Yentob. The resulting documentary, ''Cracked Actor'', featured a pasty and emaciated Bowie: the tour coincided with the singer's slide from heavy cocaine use into addiction, producing severe physical debilitation, paranoia and emotional problems. He later commented that the accompanying live album, ''David Live'', ought to have been titled "David Bowie Is Alive and Well and Living Only In Theory". ''David Live'' nevertheless solidified Bowie's status as a superstar, charting at number two in the UK and number eight in the US. It also spawned a UK number ten hit in Bowie's cover of "Knock on Wood". After a break in Philadelphia, where Bowie recorded new material, the tour resumed with a new emphasis on soul.

The fruit of the Philadelphia recording sessions was ''Young Americans'' (1975). Biographer Christopher Sandford writes, "Over the years, most British rockers had tried, one way or another, to become black-by-extension. Few had succeeded as Bowie did now." The album's sound, which the singer identified as "plastic soul", constituted a radical shift in style that initially alienated many of his UK devotees. ''Young Americans'' yielded Bowie's first US number one, "Fame", co-written with John Lennon, who contributed backing vocals, and Carlos Alomar. Lennon would call Bowie's work as "great, but just rock and roll with lipstick on". Earning the distinction of being one of the first white artists to appear on the US variety show ''Soul Train'', Bowie mimed "Fame", as well as "Golden Years", his October single, and that it was offered to Elvis Presley to perform, but Presley declined it. ''Young Americans'' was a commercial success in both the US and the UK, and a re-issue of the 1969 single "Space Oddity" became Bowie's first number one hit in the UK a few months after "Fame" achieved the same in the US. Despite his by now well established superstardom, Bowie, in the words of biographer Christopher Sandford, "for all his record sales (over a million copies of ''Ziggy Stardust'' alone), existed essentially on loose change." In 1975, in a move echoing Pitt's acrimonious dismissal 15 years earlier, Bowie fired his manager. At the culmination of the ensuing months-long legal dispute, he watched, as described by Sandford, "millions of dollars of his future earnings being surrendered" in what were "uniquely generous terms for Defries", then "shut himself up in West 20th Street, where for a week his howls could be heard through the locked attic door." Michael Lippman, Bowie's lawyer during the negotiations, became his new manager; Lippman in turn would be awarded substantial compensation when Bowie fired him the following year.

''Station to Station'' (1976) introduced a new Bowie persona, the "Thin White Duke" of its title track. Visually, the character was an extension of Thomas Jerome Newton, the extraterrestrial being he portrayed in the film ''The Man Who Fell to Earth'' the same year. Developing the funk and soul of ''Young Americans'', ''Station to Station'' also prefigured the Krautrock and synthesiser music of his next releases. The extent to which drug addiction was now affecting Bowie was made public when Russell Harty interviewed the singer for his London Weekend Television talk show in anticipation of the album's supporting tour. Shortly before the satellite-linked interview was scheduled to commence, the death of the Spanish dictator General Franco was announced. Bowie was asked to relinquish the satellite booking, to allow the Spanish Government to put out a live newsfeed. This he refused to do, and his interview went ahead. In the ensuing conversation with Harty, as described by biographer David Buckley, "the singer made hardly any sense at all throughout what was quite an extensive interview. [...] Bowie looked completely disconnected and was hardly able to utter a coherent sentence." His sanity—by his own later admission—had become twisted from cocaine; he overdosed several times during the year, and was withering physically to an alarming degree.

''Station to Station''s January 1976 release was followed in February by a three-and-a-half-month concert tour of Europe and North America. Featuring a starkly lit set, the Isolar – 1976 Tour highlighted songs from the album, including the dramatic and lengthy title track, the ballads "Wild Is the Wind" and "Word on a Wing", and the funkier "TVC 15" and "Stay". The core band that coalesced around this album and tour—rhythm guitarist Alomar, bassist George Murray, and drummer Dennis Davis—would continue as a stable unit for the remainder of the 1970s. The tour was highly successful but mired in political controversy. Bowie was quoted in Stockholm as saying that "Britain could benefit from a Fascist leader", and detained by customs on the Russian/Polish border for possessing Nazi paraphernalia. Matters came to a head in London in May in what became known as the "Victoria Station incident". Arriving in an open-top Mercedes convertible, the singer waved to the crowd in a gesture that some alleged was a Nazi salute, which was captured on camera and published in ''NME''. Bowie said the photographer simply caught him in mid-wave. He later blamed his pro-Fascism comments and his behaviour during the period on his addictions and the character of the Thin White Duke. "I was out of my mind, totally crazed. The main thing I was functioning on was mythology ... that whole thing about Hitler and Rightism ... I'd discovered King Arthur ...". According to playwright Alan Franks, writing later in ''The Times'', "he was indeed 'deranged'. He had some very bad experiences with hard drugs."

1976–79: the Berlin era

Bowie moved to Switzerland in 1976, purchasing a chalet in the hills to the north of Lake Geneva. In the new environment, his cocaine use increased; so too did his interest in pursuits outside his musical career. He took up painting, producing a number of post-modernist pieces. When on tour, he took to sketching in a notebook, and photographing scenes for later reference. Visiting galleries in Geneva and the Brücke Museum in Berlin, Bowie became, in the words of biographer Christopher Sandford, "a prolific producer and collector of contemporary art. [...] Not only did he become a well-known patron of expressionist art: locked in Clos des Mésanges he began an intensive self-improvement course in classical music and literature, and started work on an autobiography".

Before the end of 1976, Bowie's interest in the burgeoning German music scene, as well as his drug addiction, prompted him to move to West Berlin to clean up and revitalise his career. Working with Brian Eno while sharing an apartment in Schöneberg with Iggy Pop, he began to focus on minimalist, ambient music for the first of three albums, co-produced with Tony Visconti, that would become known as his Berlin Trilogy. During the same period, Iggy Pop, with Bowie as a co-writer and musician, completed his solo album debut, ''The Idiot'', and its follow-up, ''Lust for Life'', touring the UK, Europe, and the US in March and April 1977. ''Low'' (1977), partly influenced by the Krautrock sound of Kraftwerk and Neu!, evidenced a move away from narration in Bowie's songwriting to a more abstract musical form in which lyrics were sporadic and optional. It received considerable negative criticism upon its release—a release which RCA, anxious to maintain the established commercial momentum, did not welcome, and which Bowie's ex-manager, Tony Defries, who still maintained a significant financial interest in the singer's affairs, tried to prevent. Despite these forebodings, ''Low'' yielded the UK number three single "Sound and Vision", and its own performance surpassed that of ''Station to Station'' in the UK chart, where it reached number two. Leading contemporary composer Philip Glass described ''Low'' as "a work of genius" in 1992, when he used it as the basis for his ''Symphony No. 1 "Low"''; subsequently, Glass used Bowie's next album as the basis for his 1996 ''Symphony No. 4 "Heroes"''. Glass has praised Bowie's gift for creating "fairly complex pieces of music, masquerading as simple pieces".

Echoing ''Low''s minimalist, instrumental approach, the second of the trilogy, ''"Heroes"'' (1977), incorporated pop and rock to a greater extent, seeing Bowie joined by guitarist Robert Fripp. Like ''Low'', ''"Heroes"'' evinced the zeitgeist of the Cold War, symbolised by the divided city of Berlin. Incorporating ambient sounds from a variety of sources including white noise generators, synthesizers and koto, the album was another hit, reaching number three in the UK. Its title track, though only reaching number 24 in the UK singles chart, gained lasting popularity, and within months had been released in both German and French. Towards the end of the year, Bowie performed the song for Marc Bolan's television show ''Marc'', and again two days later for Bing Crosby's televised Christmas special, when he joined Crosby in "Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy", a version of "The Little Drummer Boy" with a new, contrapuntal verse. Five years later, the duet would prove a worldwide seasonal hit, charting in the UK at number three on Christmas Day, 1982.

After completing ''Low'' and ''"Heroes"'', Bowie spent much of 1978 on the Isolar II world tour, bringing the music of the first two Berlin Trilogy albums to almost a million people during 70 concerts in 12 countries. By now he had broken his drug addiction; biographer David Buckley writes that Isolar II was "Bowie's first tour for five years in which he had probably not anaesthetised himself with copious quantities of cocaine before taking the stage. [...] Without the oblivion that drugs had brought, he was now in a healthy enough mental condition to want to make friends." Recordings from the tour made up the live album ''Stage'', released the same year.

The final piece in what Bowie called his "triptych", ''Lodger'' (1979), eschewed the minimalist, ambient nature of the other two, making a partial return to the drum- and guitar-based rock and pop of his pre-Berlin era. The result was a complex mixture of New Wave and World Music, in places incorporating Hejaz non-Western scales. Some tracks were composed using Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies cards: "Boys Keep Swinging" entailed band members swapping instruments, "Move On" used the chords from Bowie's early composition "All the Young Dudes" played backwards, and "Red Money" took backing tracks from "Sister Midnight", a piece previously composed with Iggy Pop. The album was recorded in Switzerland. Ahead of its release, RCA's Mel Ilberman stated, "It would be fair to call it Bowie's ''Sergeant Pepper'' [...] a concept album that portrays the Lodger as a homeless wanderer, shunned and victimized by life's pressures and technology." As described by biographer Christopher Sandford, "The record dashed such high hopes with dubious choices, and production that spelt the end—for fifteen years—of Bowie's partnership with Eno." ''Lodger'' reached number 4 in the UK and number 20 in the US, and yielded the UK hit singles "Boys Keep Swinging" and "DJ". Towards the end of the year, Bowie and Angela initiated divorce proceedings, and after months of court battles the marriage was ended in early 1980.

1980–89: from superstar to megastar

''Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)'' (1980) produced the number one hit "Ashes to Ashes", featuring the textural work of guitar-synthesist Chuck Hammer and revisiting the character of Major Tom from "Space Oddity". The song gave international exposure to the underground New Romantic movement when Bowie visited the London club "Blitz"—the main New Romantic hangout—to recruit several of the regulars (including Steve Strange of the band Visage) to act in the accompanying video, renowned as one of the most innovative of all time. While ''Scary Monsters'' utilised principles established by the Berlin albums, it was considered by critics to be far more direct musically and lyrically. The album's hard rock edge included conspicuous guitar contributions from Robert Fripp, Pete Townshend, Chuck Hammer and Tom Verlaine. As "Ashes to Ashes" hit number one on the UK charts, Bowie opened a three-month run on Broadway on 24 September, starring in ''The Elephant Man''.

Bowie paired with Queen in 1981 for a one-off single release, "Under Pressure". The duet was a hit, becoming Bowie's third UK number one single. The same year, he made a cameo appearance in the German film ''Christiane F.'', a real-life story of teenage drug addiction in 1970s Berlin. The soundtrack, in which Bowie's music featured prominently, was released as ''Christiane F.'' a few months later. Bowie was given the lead role in the BBC's 1981 televised adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's play ''Baal''. Coinciding with its transmission, a five-track EP of songs from the play, recorded earlier in Berlin, was released as ''David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht's Baal''. In March 1982, the month before Paul Schrader's film ''Cat People'' came out, Bowie's title song, "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)", was released as a single, becoming a minor US hit and entering the UK top 30.

Bowie reached a new peak of popularity and commercial success in 1983 with ''Let's Dance''. Co-produced by Chic's Nile Rodgers, the album went platinum in both the UK and the US. Its three singles became top twenty hits in both countries, where its title track reached number one. "Modern Love" and "China Girl" made number two in the UK, accompanied by a pair of acclaimed promotional videos that, as described by biographer David Buckley, "were totally absorbing and activated key archetypes in the pop world. 'Let's Dance', with its little narrative surrounding the young Aborigine couple, targeted 'youth', and 'China Girl', with its bare-bummed (and later partially-censored) beach lovemaking scene (a homage to the film ''From Here to Eternity''), was sufficiently sexually provocative to guarantee heavy rotation on MTV. By 1983, Bowie had emerged as one of the most important video artists of the day. ''Let's Dance'' was followed by the Serious Moonlight Tour, during which Bowie was accompanied by guitarist Earl Slick and backing vocalists Frank and George Simms. The world tour lasted six months and was extremely popular.

''Tonight'' (1984), another dance-oriented album, found Bowie collaborating with Tina Turner and, once again, Iggy Pop. It included a number of cover songs, among them the 1966 Beach Boys hit "God Only Knows". The album bore the transatlantic top ten hit "Blue Jean", itself the inspiration for a short film that won Bowie a Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video, "Jazzin' for Blue Jean". Bowie performed at Wembley in 1985 for Live Aid, a multi-venue benefit concert for Ethiopian famine relief. During the event, the video for a fundraising single was premièred, Bowie's duet with Jagger. "Dancing in the Street" quickly went to number one on release. The same year, Bowie worked with the Pat Metheny Group to record "This Is Not America" for the soundtrack of ''The Falcon and the Snowman''. Released as a single, the song became a top 40 hit in the UK and US.

Bowie was given a role in the 1986 film ''Absolute Beginners''. It was poorly received by critics, but Bowie's theme song rose to number two in the UK charts. He also appeared as Jareth, the Goblin King, in the 1986 Jim Henson film ''Labyrinth'', for which he wrote five songs. His final solo album of the decade was 1987's ''Never Let Me Down'', where he ditched the light sound of his previous two albums, instead offering harder rock with an industrial/techno dance edge. Peaking at number six in the UK, the album yielded the hits "Day-In, Day-Out" (his 60th single), "Time Will Crawl", and "Never Let Me Down". Bowie later described it as his "nadir", calling it "an awful album". Supporting ''Never Let Me Down'', and preceded by nine promotional press shows, the 86-concert Glass Spider Tour commenced on 30 May. Bowie's backing band included Peter Frampton on lead guitar. Critics maligned the tour as overproduced, saying it pandered to the current stadium rock trends in its special effects and dancing.

1989–91: Tin Machine

Bowie shelved his solo career in 1989, retreating to the relative anonymity of band membership for the first time since the early 1970s. A hard-rocking quartet, Tin Machine came into being after Bowie began to work experimentally with guitarist Reeves Gabrels. The line-up was completed by Tony and Hunt Sales, known by Bowie since the late 1970s for their contribution, on drums and bass respectively, to Iggy Pop's 1977 album ''Lust For Life''.

Though he intended Tin Machine to operate as a democracy, Bowie dominated, both in songwriting and in decision-making. The band's album debut, ''Tin Machine'' (1989), was initially popular, though its politicised lyrics did not find universal approval: Bowie described one song as "a simplistic, naive, radical, laying-it-down about the emergence of neo-Nazis"; in the view of biographer Christopher Sandford, "It took nerve to denounce drugs, fascism and TV [...] in terms that reached the literary level of a comic book." EMI complained of "lyrics that preach" as well as "repetitive tunes" and "minimalist or no production". The album nevertheless reached number three in the UK. Tin Machine's first world tour was a commercial success, but there was growing reluctance—among fans and critics alike—to accept Bowie's presentation as merely a band member. A series of Tin Machine singles failed to chart, and Bowie, after a disagreement with EMI, left the label. Like his audience and his critics, Bowie himself became increasingly disaffected with his role as just one member of a band. Tin Machine began work on a second album, but Bowie put the venture on hold and made a return to solo work. Performing his early hits during the seven-month Sound+Vision Tour, he found commercial success and acclaim once again.

In October 1990, a decade after his divorce from Angela, Bowie and Somali-born supermodel Iman were introduced by a mutual friend. Bowie recalled, "I was naming the children the night we met ... it was absolutely immediate." They would marry in 1992. Tin Machine resumed work the same month, but their audience and critics, ultimately left disappointed by the first album, showed little interest in a second. ''Tin Machine II''s arrival was marked by a widely publicised and ill-timed conflict over the cover art: after production had begun, the new record label, Victory, deemed the depiction of four ancient nude Kouroi statues, judged by Bowie to be "in exquisite taste", "a show of wrong, obscene images", requiring air-brushing and patching to render the figures sexless. Tin Machine toured again, but after the live album ''Tin Machine Live: Oy Vey, Baby'' failed commercially, the band drifted apart, and Bowie, though he continued to collaborate with Gabrels, resumed his solo career.

1992–99: electronica

In April 1992 Bowie appeared at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, following the Queen frontman's death the previous year. As well as performing "Heroes" and "All the Young Dudes", he was joined on "Under Pressure" by Annie Lennox, who took Mercury's vocal part. Four days later, Bowie and Iman were married in Switzerland. Intending to move to Los Angeles, they flew in to search for a suitable property, but found themselves confined to their hotel, under curfew: the 1992 Los Angeles riots began the day they arrived. They settled in New York instead.

1993 saw the release of Bowie's first solo offering since his Tin Machine departure, the soul, jazz and hip-hop influenced ''Black Tie White Noise''. Making prominent use of electronic instruments, the album, which reunited Bowie with ''Let's Dance'' producer Nile Rodgers, confirmed Bowie's return to popularity, hitting the number one spot on the UK charts and spawning three top 40 hits, including the top 10 song "Jump They Say". Bowie explored new directions on ''The Buddha of Suburbia'' (1993), a soundtrack album of incidental music composed for the TV series adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's novel. It contained some of the new elements introduced in ''Black Tie White Noise'', and also signalled a move towards alternative rock. The album was a critical success but received a low-key release and only made number 87 in the UK charts.

Reuniting Bowie with Eno, the quasi-industrial ''Outside'' (1995) was originally conceived as the first volume in a non-linear narrative of art and murder. Featuring characters from a short story written by Bowie, the album achieved US and UK chart success, and yielded three top 40 UK singles. In a move that provoked mixed reaction from both fans and critics, Bowie chose Nine Inch Nails as his tour partner for the Outside Tour. Visiting cities in Europe and North America between September 1995 and February the following year, the tour saw the return of Gabrels as Bowie's guitarist.

Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 17 January 1996. Incorporating experiments in British jungle and drum 'n' bass, ''Earthling'' (1997) was a critical and commercial success in the UK and the US, and two singles from the album became UK top 40 hits. Bowie's song "I'm Afraid of Americans" from the Paul Verhoeven film ''Showgirls'' was re-recorded for the album, and remixed by Trent Reznor for a single release. The heavy rotation of the accompanying video, also featuring Reznor, contributed to the song's 16-week stay in the US ''Billboard'' Hot 100. The Earthling Tour took in Europe and North America between June and November 1997. Bowie reunited with Visconti in 1998 to record "(Safe in This) Sky Life" for ''The Rugrats Movie''. Although the track was edited out of the final cut, it would later be re-recorded and released as "Safe" on the B-side of Bowie's 2002 single "Everyone Says 'Hi'". The reunion led to other collaborations including a limited-edition single release version of Placebo's track "Without You I'm Nothing", co-produced by Visconti, with Bowie's harmonised vocal added to the original recording.

1999–present: Neoclassicist Bowie

Bowie created the soundtrack for ''Omikron'', a 1999 computer game in which he and Iman also appeared as characters. Released the same year and containing re-recorded tracks from Omikron, his album '''Hours...''' featured a song with lyrics by the winner of his "Cyber Song Contest" Internet competition, Alex Grant. Making extensive use of live instruments, the album was Bowie's exit from heavy electronica. Sessions for the planned album ''Toy'', intended to feature new versions of some of Bowie's earliest pieces as well as three new songs, commenced in 2000, but the album was never released. Bowie and Visconti continued their collaboration, producing a new album of completely original songs instead: the result of the sessions was the 2002 album ''Heathen''. Alexandria Zahra Jones, Bowie and Iman's daughter, was born on 15 August.

In October 2001, Bowie opened The Concert for New York City, a charity event to benefit the victims of the September 11 attacks, with a minimalist performance of Simon & Garfunkel's "America", followed by a full band performance of "Heroes". 2002 saw the release of ''Heathen'', and, during the second half of the year, the Heathen Tour. Taking in Europe and North America, the tour opened at London's annual ''Meltdown'' festival, for which Bowie was that year appointed artistic director. Among the acts he selected for the festival were Philip Glass, Television and The Polyphonic Spree. As well as songs from the new album, the tour featured material from Bowie's ''Low'' era. ''Reality'' (2003) followed, and its accompanying world tour, the A Reality Tour, with an estimated attendance of 722,000, grossed more than any other in 2004. Onstage in Oslo, Norway, on 18 June, Bowie was hit in the eye with a lollipop thrown by a fan; a week later he suffered chest pain while performing at the Hurricane Festival in Scheeßel, Germany. Originally thought to be a pinched nerve in his shoulder, the pain was later diagnosed as an acutely blocked artery, requiring an emergency angioplasty in Hamburg. The remaining 14 dates of the tour were cancelled.

Since recuperating from the heart surgery, Bowie has reduced his musical output, making only one-off appearances on stage and in the studio. He sang in a duet of his 1972 song "Changes" with Butterfly Boucher for the 2004 animated film ''Shrek 2''. During a relatively quiet 2005, he recorded the vocals for the song "(She Can) Do That", co-written with Brian Transeau, for the film ''Stealth''. He returned to the stage on 8 September 2005, appearing with Arcade Fire for the US nationally televised event Fashion Rocks, and performed with the Canadian band for the second time a week later during the CMJ Music Marathon. He contributed back-up vocals on TV on the Radio's song "Province" for their album ''Return to Cookie Mountain'', made a commercial with Snoop Dogg for XM Satellite Radio, and joined with Lou Reed on Danish alt-rockers Kashmir's 2005 album ''No Balance Palace''.

Bowie was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award on 8 February 2006. In April, he announced, "I’m taking a year off—no touring, no albums." He made a surprise guest appearance at David Gilmour's 29 May concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The event was recorded, and a selection of songs on which he had contributed joint vocals were subsequently released. He performed again in November, alongside Alicia Keys, at the Black Ball, a New York benefit event for Keep a Child Alive.

Bowie was chosen to curate the 2007 High Line Festival, selecting musicians and artists for the Manhattan event, and performed on Scarlett Johansson's 2008 album of Tom Waits covers, ''Anywhere I Lay My Head''. On the 40th anniversary of the July 1969 moon landing—and Bowie's accompanying commercial breakthrough with "Space Oddity"—EMI released the individual tracks from the original eight-track studio recording of the song, in a 2009 contest inviting members of the public to create a remix. ''A Reality Tour'', a double album of live material from the 2003 concert tour, was released in January 2010.

In late March 2011, ''Toy'', Bowie's previously unreleased album from 2001, was leaked onto the internet, containing material used for ''Heathen'' and most of its single B-sides, as well as unheard new versions of his early back catalogue.

Acting career

Biographer David Buckley writes, "The essence of Bowie's contribution to popular music can be found in his outstanding ability to analyse and select ideas from outside the mainstream—from art, literature, theatre and film—and to bring them inside, so that the currency of pop is constantly being changed." Buckley says "Just one person took glam rock to new rarefied heights and invented character-playing in pop, marrying theatre and popular music in one seamless, powerful whole." Bowie's career has also been punctuated by various roles in film and theatre productions, earning him some acclaim as an actor in his own right.

The beginnings of his acting career predate his commercial breakthrough as a musician. Studying avant-garde theatre and mime under Lindsay Kemp, he was given the role of Cloud in Kemp's 1967 theatrical production ''Pierrot in Turquoise'' (later made into the 1970 television film ''The Looking Glass Murders''). In the black-and-white short ''The Image'' (1969), he played a ghostly boy who emerges from a troubled artist's painting to haunt him. The same year, the film of Leslie Thomas's 1966 comic novel ''The Virgin Soldiers'' saw Bowie make a brief appearance as an extra. Bowie starred in ''The Hunger'' (1983), a revisionist vampire film, with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. In Nagisa Oshima's film the same year, ''Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence'', based on Laurens van der Post's novel ''The Seed and the Sower'', Bowie played Major Jack Celliers, a prisoner of war in a Japanese internment camp. Bowie had a cameo in ''Yellowbeard'', a 1983 pirate comedy created by Monty Python members, and a small part as Colin, the hitman in the 1985 film ''Into the Night''. He declined to play the villain Max Zorin in the James Bond film ''A View to a Kill'' (1985).

''Absolute Beginners'' (1986), a rock musical based on Colin MacInnes's 1959 novel about London life, featured Bowie's music and presented him with a minor acting role. The same year, Jim Henson's dark fantasy ''Labyrinth'' found him with the part of Jareth, the king of the goblins. Two years later he played Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese's 1988 film ''The Last Temptation of Christ''. Bowie portrayed a disgruntled restaurant employee opposite Rosanna Arquette in ''The Linguini Incident'' (1991), and the mysterious FBI agent Phillip Jeffries in David Lynch's ''Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me'' (1992). He took a small but pivotal role as Andy Warhol in ''Basquiat'', artist/director Julian Schnabel's 1996 biopic of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and co-starred in Giovanni Veronesi's Spaghetti Western ''Il Mio West'' (1998, released as ''Gunslinger's Revenge'' in the US in 2005) as the most feared gunfighter in the region. He played the ageing gangster Bernie in Andrew Goth's ''Everybody Loves Sunshine'' (1999), and appeared in the TV horror serial of ''The Hunger''. In ''Mr. Rice's Secret'' (2000), he played the title role as the neighbour of a terminally ill twelve-year-old, and the following year appeared as himself in ''Zoolander''.

Bowie portrayed physicist Nikola Tesla in the Christopher Nolan film, ''The Prestige'' (2006), which was about the bitter rivalry between two magicians in the early 20th century. He voice-acted in the animated film ''Arthur and the Invisibles'' as the powerful villain Maltazard, and lent his voice to the character Lord Royal Highness in the ''SpongeBob's Atlantis SquarePantis'' television film. In the 2008 film ''August'', directed by Austin Chick, he played a supporting role as Ogilvie, alongside Josh Hartnett and Rip Torn, with whom he had worked in 1976 for ''The Man Who Fell to Earth''.

Sexual orientation

Buckley writes, "If Ziggy confused both his creator and his audience, a big part of that confusion centred on the topic of sexuality." Bowie declared himself bisexual in an interview with Michael Watts of ''Melody Maker'' in January 1972, a move coinciding with the first shots in his campaign for stardom as Ziggy Stardust.

In a 1983 interview with ''Rolling Stone'', Bowie said his public declaration of bisexuality was "the biggest mistake I ever made", and on other occasions he said his interest in homosexual and bisexual culture had been more a product of the times and the situation in which he found himself than his own feelings; as described by Buckley, he said he had been driven more by "a compulsion to flout moral codes than a real biological and psychological state of being".

Asked in 2002 by ''Blender'' whether he still believed his public declaration was the biggest mistake he ever made, he replied: }}

Buckley's view of the period is that Bowie, "a taboo-breaker and a dabbler ... mined sexual intrigue for its ability to shock", and that "it is probably true that Bowie was never gay, nor even consistently actively bisexual ... he did, from time to time, experiment, even if only out of a sense of curiosity and a genuine allegiance with the 'transgressional'." Biographer Christopher Sandford says that according to Mary Finnigan, with whom Bowie had an affair in 1969, the singer and his first wife Angie "lived in a fantasy world [...] and they created their bisexual fantasy." Sandford tells how, during the marriage, Bowie "made a positive fetish of repeating the quip that he and his wife had met while 'fucking the same bloke' [...] Gay sex was always an anecdotal and laughing matter. That Bowie's actual tastes swung the other way is clear from even a partial tally of his affairs with women."

Musicianship

From the time of his earliest recordings in the 1960s, Bowie has employed a wide variety of musical styles. His early compositions and performances were strongly influenced not only by rock and rollers like Little Richard and Elvis Presley but also by the wider world of show business. He particularly strove to emulate the British musical theatre singer-songwriter and actor Anthony Newley, whose vocal style he frequently adopted, and made prominent use of for his 1967 debut release, ''David Bowie'' (to the disgust of Newley himself, who destroyed the copy he received from Bowie's publisher). Bowie's music hall fascination continued to surface sporadically alongside such diverse styles as hard rock and heavy metal, soul, psychedelic folk and pop.

Musicologist James Perone observes Bowie's use of octave switches for different repetitions of the same melody, exemplified in his commercial breakthrough single, "Space Oddity", and later in the song "Heroes", to dramatic effect; Perone notes that "in the lowest part of his vocal register [...] his voice has an almost crooner-like richness."

Voice instructor Jo Thompson describes Bowie's vocal vibrato technique as "particularly deliberate and distinctive". Schinder and Schwartz call him "a vocalist of extraordinary technical ability, able to pitch his singing to particular effect." Here, too, as in his stagecraft and songwriting, the singer's chamaeleon-like nature is evident: historiographer Michael Campbell says that Bowie's lyrics "arrest our ear, without question. But Bowie continually shifts from person to person as he delivers them [...] His voice changes dramatically from section to section."

Bowie plays many instruments, among them electric, acoustic, and twelve-string guitar, alto, tenor and baritone saxophone, keyboards including piano, synthesizers and Mellotron, harmonica, Stylophone, xylophone, vibraphone, koto, drums and percussion, and string instruments including viola and cello.

Legacy

Bowie's innovative songs and stagecraft brought a new dimension to popular music in the early 1970s, strongly influencing both its immediate forms and its subsequent development. A pioneer of glam rock, Bowie, according to music historians Schinder and Schwartz, has joint responsibility with Marc Bolan for creating the genre. At the same time, he inspired the innovators of the punk rock music movement—historian Michael Campbell calls him "one of punk's seminal influences". While punk musicians trashed the conventions of pop stardom, Bowie moved on again—into a more abstract style of music making that would in turn become a transforming influence. Biographer David Buckley writes, "At a time when punk rock was noisily reclaiming the three-minute pop song in a show of public defiance, Bowie almost completely abandoned traditional rock instrumentation." Bowie's record company sought to convey his unique status in popular music with the slogan, "There is old wave, there is new wave, and there is Bowie..." Musicologist James Perone credits him with having "brought sophistication to rock music", and critical reviews frequently acknowledge the intellectual depth of his work and influence.

Buckley writes that, in an early 1970s pop world that was "Bloated, self-important, leather-clad, self-satisfied, ... Bowie challenged the core belief of the rock music of its day." As described by John Peel, "The one distinguishing feature about early-70s progressive rock was that it didn't progress. Before Bowie came along, people didn't want too much change." Buckley says that Bowie "subverted the whole notion of what it was to be a rock star", with the result that "After Bowie there has been no other pop icon of his stature, because the pop world that produces these rock gods doesn't exist any more. ... The fierce partisanship of the cult of Bowie was also unique—its influence lasted longer and has been more creative than perhaps almost any other force within pop fandom." Buckley concludes that "Bowie is both star and icon. The vast body of work he has produced ... has created perhaps the biggest cult in popular culture. ... His influence has been unique in popular culture—he has permeated and altered more lives than any comparable figure."

Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996. Through perpetual reinvention, he has seen his influence continue to broaden and extend: music reviewer Brad Filicky writes that over the decades, "Bowie has become known as a musical chameleon, changing and dictating trends as much as he has altered his style to fit", influencing fashion and pop culture to a degree "second only to Madonna". Biographer Thomas Forget adds, "Because he has succeeded in so many different styles of music, it is almost impossible to find a popular artist today that has not been influenced by David Bowie."

Awards and recognition

Bowie's 1969 commercial breakthrough, the song "Space Oddity", won him an Ivor Novello Special Award For Originality. For his performance in the 1976 science fiction film ''The Man Who Fell to Earth'', he won a Saturn Award for Best Actor. In the ensuing decades he has been honoured with numerous awards for his music and its accompanying videos, receiving, among others, two Grammy Awards and two BRIT Awards.

In 1999, Bowie was made a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. He received an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music the same year. He declined the British honour Commander of the British Empire in 2000, and a knighthood in 2003, stating: "I would never have any intention of accepting anything like that. I seriously don't know what it's for. It's not what I spent my life working for."

Throughout his career he has sold an estimated 136 million albums. In the United Kingdom, he has been awarded 9 Platinum, 11 Gold and 8 Silver albums, and in the United States, 5 Platinum and 7 Gold. In the BBC's 2002 poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, he was ranked 29. In 2004, ''Rolling Stone'' magazine ranked him 39th on their list of the 100 Greatest Rock Artists of All Time and the 23rd best singer of all time. Bowie was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 17 January 1996.

Discography

''David Bowie'' (1967)

''Space Oddity'' (1969)

''The Man Who Sold the World'' (1970)

''Hunky Dory'' (1971)

''The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars'' (1972)

''Aladdin Sane'' (1973)

''Pin Ups'' (1973)

''Diamond Dogs'' (1974)

''Young Americans'' (1975)

''Station to Station'' (1976)

''Low'' (1977)

''"Heroes"'' (1977)

''Lodger'' (1979)

''Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)'' (1980)

''Let's Dance'' (1983)

''Tonight'' (1984)

''Never Let Me Down'' (1987)

''Black Tie White Noise'' (1993)

''Outside'' (1995)

''Earthling'' (1997)

'''Hours...''' (1999)

''Heathen'' (2002)

''Reality'' (2003)

See also

Best selling music artists

Bowie Bonds

List of artists who reached number one on the Hot 100 (US)

List of artists who reached number one on the US Dance chart

List of David Bowie tours

List of number-one hits (United States)

List of Number 1 Dance Hits (United States)

List of people who have declined a British honour

Notes

References

Further reading

Trynka Paul, ''Starman: David Bowie – The Definitive Biography'', Little, Brown Book Group Limited, 2011

Cann, David, ''Any Day Now: David Bowie the London Years 1947–1974'', Kenneth Pitt in Books, 2011

Jacke, Andreas, ''David Bowie – Station To Station'', Psychosozial- Verlag, 2011

Seabrook, Thomas Jerome, ''Bowie in Berlin: A New Career in a New Town'', Jawbone Press, 2008.

Spitz, Marc, ''Bowie: A Biography'', Crown Publishers, 2009.

Tremlett, George, ''David Bowie: Living on the Brink'', Carroll and Graf, 1997.

Waldrep, Shelton, "Phenomenology of Performance", ''The Aesthetics of Self-Invention: Oscar Wilde to David Bowie'', University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Welch, Chris, ''David Bowie: We Could Be Heroes: The Stories Behind Every David Bowie Song'', Da Capo Press, 1999.

Wilcken, Hugo, ''33⅓: David Bowie's'' Low, Continuum, 2005.

External links

Official Myspace page

Official YouTube channel

Bowieart – paintings, printmakings, etc.

Category:1947 births Category:Bisexual actors Category:Bisexual musicians Category:BRIT Award winners Category:Columbia Records artists Category:Commandeurs of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres Category:Decca Records artists Category:EMI Records artists Category:English film actors Category:English male singers Category:English multi-instrumentalists Category:English people of Irish descent Category:English record producers Category:English rock musicians Category:English singer-songwriters Category:Glam rock Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:Ivor Novello Award winners Category:LGBT musicians from the United Kingdom Category:LGBT parents Category:LGBT people from England Category:Living people Category:Musicians from London Category:People from Brixton Category:RCA Victor artists Category:Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Category:Singers from London Category:Virgin Records artists Category:Androgyny

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