Whitney Houston: From Triumph to Tragedy

Whitney Houston, a willowy church singer with a towering voice who became a titan of the pop charts in the 1980s and 1990s but then saw much of her success crumble away amid the fumes of addiction and reckless ego, has died. She was 48.

Kristen Foster, her publicist, announced that the singer had died and police sources later confirmed that she was found unresponsive in her room at the Beverly Hilton Hotel about 3.30pm on Saturday. Paramedics performed CPR on her, but she was pronounced dead at 4pm, Beverly Hills Police Lt Mark Rosen told KTLA News. An investigation into the cause of death is pending. On Thursday afternoon at the hotel, Houston drew the attention of reporters and security staff with her erratic behaviour, dripping sweat and dishevelled clothes. The singer was disruptive at that day's rehearsals for music mogul Clive Davis' annual pre-Grammy party.

The beginning

Whitney Elizabeth Houston was born August 9, 1963, in Newark, New Jersey, and powerful female voices and the sound of choirs were in her ears before she could walk or talk. Cissy Houston, her mother, was a gospel singer. Aretha Franklin was her godmother and Dionne Warwick and Dee Dee Warwick were her cousins. There was little doubt that young Whitney would follow their career paths.

In her family's basement she would belt out Respect and bask in the applause that she might have considered her birthright. By high school she was singing back-up for Chaka Khan and had also embarked on a modelling career that put her in the glossy spreads of Seventeen and Glamour magazines.

At Sweetwaters supper club in Manhattan, she was spotted by mogul Clive Davis, who saw in Houston a rare bundle of raw talent, beauty and pedigree. He spent two years and $250,000 (Dh918,200) to prepare and package her before releasing her 1985 debut album, Whitney Houston, which would became a mega-seller.

Whitney Houston became the first album by a new female artist to yield three No. 1 singles: Saving All My Love for You, How Will I Know and The Greatest Love of All. Critics moaned that the material was too flimsy for a such a prodigious instrument, but Houston revelled in the success.

The high point

Houston's follow-up album, Whitney, in the summer of 1987, delivered hit after hit with I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me), Didn't We Almost Have It All, So Emotional and Where Do Broken Hearts Go. She sold more than 170 million albums, singles and videos. Houston's stirring rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner at the 1991 Super Bowl (far right) became a signature as she became a powerful influence on several generations of singers, especially Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera, Alicia Keys, Queen Latifah and Jennifer Hudson.

The awards

Houston amassed rooms full of trophies through the years, including 22 American Music Awards — more than any other woman — and six Grammys. Any awards show she was on was must-see television, although the reasons for that changed through the years.

Film — her next frontier

From topping the pop charts, the next frontier was film, and in 1992 Houston starred with Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard. The soundtrack won the 1994 Grammy for Album of the Year and also yielded the hit I Will Always Love You, which became the best-selling single by a female artist in music history.

In 1995's Waiting to Exhale, Houston showed that, like Diana Ross, she aspired to a more complex acting persona. And she had recently finished shooting Sparkle, a remake of a 1976 Irene Cara film that focuses on addiction in the music industry. The Hollywood career was made wobbly by the personal issues and the bad press. In 1996, to promote the wholesome film The Preacher's Wife, Houston spoke to The Washington Post about the struggles of separating her Sunday morning reputation from her Saturday night misadventures. "I've just kind of prepared myself for what's to be expected from the media," she says. "Everybody wants good press. No one wants lies. Fame is a very curious game."

Bobbi Brown

The two superstar singers met at the 1989 Soul Train Music Awards and married three years later. To some, it seemed an odd match, the glamorous pop star and the bad boy. "When you love, you love. I mean, do you stop loving somebody because you have different images? You know, Bobby and I basically come from the same place," she explained to Rolling Stone. "I am not always in a sequinned gown. I am nobody's angel. I can get down and dirty. I can get raunchy." Houston divorced Brown in 2007, winning custody of their daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown.

Her downfall

The star's professional decline had become a familiar part of her public saga. Her haggard appearance shocked fans who had once been drawn to the singer's world-class smile and approachable glamour in music videos, album covers, concerts and, later, hit films. Songs like I Will Always Love You and Saving All My Love for You had women around the world singing along with the star, but by the end of the 1990s they barely recognised her. As Houston's public persona veered into something darker and more volatile, many fans pointed to her relationship with Bobbi Brown as the axis on which her life seemed to be spinning so madly. She acknowledged that she was immersed in drugs and the toll on her voice and her appearance was difficult to watch. "The biggest devil is me," the singer told Diane Sawyer in a notorious 2002 interview. "I'm either my best friend or my worst enemy."