Diana Ross

Diana Ross, the American singer and actress. Ross served as lead singer of the Motown group The Supremes during the 1960s. After leaving the group in 1970, Ross began a solo career that included successful ventures into film andBroadway. She received a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her 1972 role as Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues, for which she won a Golden Globe award. She won 8 awards American Music Awards, garnered twelve Grammy Award nominations, and won a Tony Award for her one-woman show, An Evening with Diana Ross, in 1977.With a career total 18 #1 records, Diana Ross is considered the most successful female recording artist of the twentieth century.

In 1976, Billboard magazine named her the "Female Entertainer of the Century." In 1993, theGuinness Book of World Records declared Diana Ross the most successful female music artist in history due to her success in the United States and United Kingdom for having more hits than any female artist on the chart. Ross is one of the few recording artists to have two stars on theHollywood Walk of Fame—one as a solo artist and the other as a member of The Supremes. In December 2007, she received a John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Honors Award. Diana Ross has sold more than 150 million records worldwide.

After living at 635 Belmont Avenue in Detroit's North End for several years, Ross's family settled on St. Antoine Street in the Brewster-Douglass housing projects on Diana's fourteenth birthday in 1958. Ross aspired to be a fashion designer, and studied design, millinery, pattern-making and seamstress skills while attending Cass Technical High School, a four-year college preparatory magnet school, in downtown Detroit. She was a majorette, on the school's swim team, studied cosmetology in the evenings & modeling(via a loan from former neighbor, William "Smokey" Robinson)on the weekends. In her late teens, Ross worked at Hudson's Department Store where, it was claimed in biographies, that she was the first black employee "allowed outside the kitchen". Ross graduated in January 1962, one semester earlier than her classmates. Ross' parents had a difficult marriage and separated when Ross was still in her teens.

Though Ross had previously appeared in two films while a member of The Supremes, it wasn't until the early 1970s when Berry Gordy began to focus on making Ross an actress. In late 1971, Motown announced that Diana Ross was going to portray jazz icon Billie Holiday in a Motown-produced film loosely based on Holiday's autobiography Lady Sings the Blues (1956) written by Holiday and William Dufty. Some critics ridiculed Ross's casting in the role. Ross and Holiday were considered to be "miles apart" in vocal styling and appearance. Ross immersed herself in Holiday's music and life story; she knew little about Holiday and was not a big fan of jazz in general. Instead of imitating Holiday's voice, Ross focused on Holiday's vocal phrasing.

A month after the Lil Kim incident, authorities at London's Heathrow Airport detained Ross for "assaulting" a female security guard. The singer claimed that she had felt "violated as a woman" by the full-body search to which she was subjected. In retaliation, she was alleged to have touched the female airport security guard in a similar manner. The singer was detained but later released. In December 2002, Ross was arrested in Tucson, Arizona for drunk driving. She pleaded "no contest", and later served a two-day jail sentence near her home inGreenwich, Connecticut. Following the arrest and jail sentence, Ross stayed out of the American public eye during much of the following year. She performed a well-received set at Britain's Prince Charles' Prince's Trust concert, held in London's Hyde Park, in 2002, but would not return to touring until 2004.

Ross was a close friend and longtime mentor of Michael Jackson, with whom she co-starred in the 1978 film version of the Broadway musical, The Wiz (a remake of The Wizard of Oz). After Jackson's sudden death on June 25, 2009, Ross was named in his will as the custodian of his children in the event of the death of his mother, Katherine Jackson. Ross was invited to speak at the memorial held in Los Angeles on Tuesday July 7, 2009, but declined in a letter read by Smokey Robinson at the ceremony. Like Jackson's other close friends,Macaulay Culkin, Elizabeth Taylor, Quincy Jones, and Liza Minnelli, Ross stated that she wanted to grieve in private. Ross dedicated her 2010-11 "More Today Than Yesterday-Greatest Hits" tour to Michael Jackson.