Madonna (entertainer)

Madonna (entertainer), born in 1958, American pop singer and actor whose successful career has been fueled by her deliberately outrageous image. Madonna rapidly rose to stardom by flaunting her sexuality and her devil-may-care attitude. Ever provocative, she later mixed religious imagery and eroticism in her performances and drew the condemnation of the Vatican.

Born Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone in Bay City, Michigan, she started acting and dancing when she was a child. She won a dance scholarship to the University of Michigan but dropped out after two years to seek a music career in New York City. In New York Madonna formed a band and began to write songs. Her first album, Madonna (1983), generated three successful singles that reached the top of the pop music charts in 1984.

The showing of Madonna’s music videos on MTV (see Music Television), a cable television music channel, was a major factor in her tremendous success in the pop music scene over the next few years. Other successful albums include Like a Virgin (1984), True Blue (1986), Like a Prayer (1989), Bedtime Stories (1994), Ray of Light (1998), American Life (2003), and the disco-inspired Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005). Madonna has made several major concert tours, including the 1990 “Blonde Ambition” tour, the 1993 “Girlie Show” tour, the 2004 “Re-Invention” tour, and the 2006 “Confessions” tour. Her “Re-Invention” tour was notable for its use of political content and antiwar messages; observers noted that it was just one of the ways that Madonna was seeking to create a more serious and thoughtful image of herself than the one projected earlier in her career.

Madonna has taken an active business role in shaping her career, which has branched out beyond music. Her early motion-picture appearances included roles in Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Shanghai Surprise (1986), Who’s That Girl? (1987), and Dick Tracy (1990). The documentary Truth or Dare (1991) gave a behind-the-scenes look at the “Blonde Ambition” tour.

In 1992 Madonna signed a contract with Time Warner Inc. to create her own record, publishing, and motion-picture company. That same year her book Sex, containing controversial erotic photographs of herself, was published. Madonna later appeared in the films Shadows and Fog (1992), directed by American filmmaker Woody Allen; A League of Their Own (1992); Body of Evidence (1993); Four Rooms (1995); The Next Best Thing (2000); and Swept Away (2002), directed by her husband, Guy Ritchie. In 1996 she had her greatest screen success playing the role of Eva Perón in Evita (1996), the film of the musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. For this performance she won a Golden Globe Award for best actress in a musical or comedy film.

Madonna embarked on a new creative venture as a children’s book author with the publication of The English Roses in 2003. It and her subsequent books drew on themes and lessons from the Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical tradition in which Madonna has taken an interest since 1997. Madonna lives in England with her husband, her daughter Lourdes, born in 1996, and her son Rocco, born in 2000. In 2006 she adopted a one-year-old boy in Malawi, where she planned to fund a center for AIDS orphans.