Whitney Houston, queen of pop, is found dead at 48

Few pop sing­ers have been gif­ted with a voice as glor­i­ous as Whit­ney Houston’s, and even fewer have treated their tal­ent with the frus­trat­ing indif­fer­ence she did toward the end of her life. She sold more records and received more awards than almost any other female pop star of the 20th cen­tury, but spent most of her last years mired in a drug addic­tion that sapped her will to sing and left her in a sham­bolic state, said The Guard­ian’s obit­u­ary.

Con­vinced that she had what it took to be a block­bust­ing star, Arista’s influ­en­tial pres­id­ent, Clive Davis, per­son­ally over­saw the record­ing of her first album. He also turned up with her in 1983 on the Merv Griffin chat show, where she was intro­duced to the Amer­ican pub­lic. The singer was found unre­spons­ive at the Beverly Hilton Hotel hours before Clive Davis’ annual pre-Grammy Awards party.

Hou­s­ton was gospel-trained, but her voice also lent itself to R&B, pop and bal­lads, and she was adept at each style. Her total record sales topped 170 mil­lion, put­ting her in an élite group of female super­stars that included Mariah Carey and Celine Dion, both of whom were heav­ily influ­enced by her emo­tional, vibrato-laden style.

Com­mer­cially, her most barn­storm­ing pro­ject was the 1992 film The Body­guard. Kevin Cost­ner played the tit­u­lar guard, and Hou­s­ton played a film star and sang on the soundtrack. Her act­ing won her a Raz­zie award for worst act­ress (which didn’t deter her from mak­ing sev­eral more films, and get­ting bet­ter reviews), but the soundtrack became the biggest album of her career, selling 44m cop­ies and spawn­ing I Will Always Love You. The song was ines­cap­able, spend­ing 14 weeks at No 1 in the US and roost­ing at the top of nearly every other pop chart in the world.

The same year, she mar­ried ex-boy band mem­ber Bobby Brown, who came to be widely blamed for her down­ward spiral. “First of all, I want to tell you that I love you all. Second, I would like to say, I love you Whit­ney. The hard­est thing for me to do is to come on this stage.” said Brown open­ing a con­cert yesterday.

Even in a dec­ade in which celebrit­ies reg­u­larly suffered humi­li­at­ing falls from grace, Houston’s was shock­ing. Nar­cot­ics and her toxic rela­tion­ship with Brown rav­aged her looks and robbed her voice of its abil­ity to soar through concerts.

Her mother forced her into rehab in 2006, and Hou­s­ton sub­sequently divorced Brown and began work on her last album, I Look to You, which came out in 2009 to gen­er­ally pos­it­ive reviews. Her name still retained enough star-power to sell out most of the gigs on the tour pro­mot­ing I Look to You, but many fans com­plained that her voice was no longer up to the rigours of tour­ing. Her death, after so many wasted years, is a sad con­trast to her gil­ded years as America’s sweetheart.

Whit­ney Eliza­beth Hou­s­ton: born 9 August 1963; died Feb­ru­ary 11, 2012.

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