madonna biography youtube

Pop legend Madonna is known for her constant reinvention as a performer. Her biggest hits include "Papa Don't Preach," "Like a Prayer," "Vogue," "Secret," and "Ray of Light," among many others.

Who Is Madonna?

Madonna is a pop music singer and actress who went solo in 1981 and became a sensation in the then male-dominated 1980s music scene. By 1991, she had achieved 21 Top 10 hits in the United States and sold more than 70 million albums internationally. In January 2008, she was named the world's wealthiest female musician by Forbes magazine .

Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone was born in Bay City, Michigan, on August 16, 1958, to parents Silvio "Tony" Ciccone and Madonna Fortin. Tony, the son of Italian immigrants, was the first of his family to go to college, where he earned a degree in engineering. Madonna's mother, an x-ray technician and former dancer, was of French Canadian descent. After their marriage in 1955, the couple moved to Pontiac, Michigan, to be close to Tony's job as a defense engineer. Madonna was born three years later, during a visit with family in Bay City. The third of six children, Madonna learned early on how to handle her role as the middle child, admitting that she was "the sissy of the family" who often used her feminine wiles to get her way.

Her parents' strict observation of the Catholic faith played a large role in Madonna's childhood. "My mother was a religious zealot," Madonna explains. "There were always priests and nuns in my house growing up." Many elements of Catholic iconography — including her mother's statues of the Sacred Heart, the habits of the nuns at her Catholic elementary school, and the Catholic altar at which she and her family prayed daily — later became the subject of Madonna's most controversial works.

Family Tragedy: Death of Mother

She fought especially hard against the rules imposed by her stepmother, Joan Gustafson, who met Madonna's father while working as the family housekeeper. Madonna says Gustafson often made her take care of the younger children in the household, a task she greatly resented. "I really saw myself as the quintessential Cinderella," Madonna later said. "I think that's when I really thought about how I wanted to do something else and get away from all that." She rebelled against her traditional upbringing by turning her conservative clothing into revealing outfits, frequenting underground gay nightclubs and rejecting her religious background.

READ MORE: Madonna Says She’d Be a 'Completely Different Person’ If Her Mom Hadn't Died Young

Music and Dance: Late 1970s

Madonna balanced the insubordinate side of her personality with a drive for perfectionism and high achievement. She was a straight-A student, cheerleader and disciplined dancer who graduated from high school a semester earlier than her peers. In 1976, her hard work earned her the attention of the University of Michigan, which offered her a full scholarship to their dance program.

In 1977, during her undergraduate studies at Michigan, Madonna was awarded a six-week scholarship to study with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City, followed by a rare opportunity to perform with choreographer Pearl Lang in 1978. At the urging of her dance instructor, the budding star dropped out of college after only two years of study to move to New York and further her dance career. Once in New York, Madonna paid her rent with a handful of odd jobs, including nude art modeling, serving at the Russian Tea Room and performing for the American Dance Center.

In 1979, Madonna began dating Dan Gilroy, one of the founding members of a ska-influenced pop-punk band called Breakfast Club. Gilroy introduced Madonna to the head of a vaudeville review in Paris, and she spent some time in France working as a showgirl. During this trip, she fell in love with the combination of singing and performing. When she returned to the United States in 1980, she joined Gilroy's band as its drummer and later became the lead singer. Madonna formed several different bands of her own over the next few years, including Madonna & The Sky, The Millionaires and Emmy.

Rise to Pop Stardom

'everybody'.

In 1981, Madonna decided to go solo and hired manager Camille Barbone of Gotham Records to help her get her singing career on track. Barbone showed Madonna how to navigate the male-dominated world of the music business, and helped put together a studio band that accentuated the budding star's hip style. Friend Stephen Bray, a musician in her band, wrote her first hit, "Everybody," and Madonna used her brash business style to get the recordings to New York music producer Mark Kamins. Kamins then helped Madonna score a record deal with Sire Records. "Everybody" hit No. 1 on the dance charts in 1982.

'Madonna' Album: 'Borderline,' 'Lucky Star' and 'Holiday'

Using the success of the song as leverage, Madonna convinced Sire Records to produce the full-length album Madonna in 1983. The album was a slow but steady success, and included the hit singles "Borderline," "Lucky Star" and "Holiday." Soon, girls all over the country were imitating Madonna's distinct sense of fashion, which included fishnet stockings, lace lingerie, fingerless gloves and large crucifix necklaces. "Holiday" also earned the singer an appearance on Dick Clark 's American Bandstand in 1984, where she told the host that her main ambition was "to rule the world."

'Like a Virgin,' 'Material Girl' and 'Angel'

This intensity and determination was apparent in her 1985 follow-up album, Like a Virgin , which hit No. 1 on the Billboard Chart and went platinum within a month. The title track, produced by Nile Rodgers, would later be listed as Madonna's biggest pop hit of all time, with the song remaining on the top of the charts for six weeks. She had two other Top 5 hits from the record: the tongue-in-cheek, empowering "Material Girl" and the dance ditty with bounce, "Angel."

'Crazy for You'

She also starred in her first mainstream feature film, Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), and performed the soundtrack's single, "Into the Groove," which hit No. 1 on the U.S. dance charts. Her next single "Crazy for You", which she performed for the 1985 film Vision Quest , also became a No. 1 hit. She then started her first music tour, The Virgin Tour, and watched 17 consecutive songs climb into the Top 10 on the Billboard Chart while also creating a wave of iconic music videos, constantly re-crafting her persona.

Movies and More Hit Songs from the 1980s and 1990s

Over the next five years, Madonna's life was a whirlwind of activity. On August 16, 1985, she married actor Sean Penn and co-starred with him in the film Shanghai Surprise (1986). She then went on to star in three more movies over the next few years: Who's That Girl (1987), Bloodhounds of Broadway (1989) and Dick Tracy (1990). Madonna's soundtrack album I'm Breathless: Music From and Inspired by the Film Dick Tracy resulted in two Top 10 hits: "Vogue" and "Hanky Panky." She also released four more hit albums: True Blue (1986), Who's that Girl (1987), You Can Dance (1987) and Like a Prayer (1989).

READ MORE: The Hollywood Icons Featured in Madonna's Song "Vogue"

Controversies

'like a virgin' mtv video music awards performance.

As always, Madonna mixed her drive for success with her penchant for scandalous behavior. It started with her controversial 1985 performance of her hit single "Like a Virgin" on the MTV Video Music Awards, which involved writhing around suggestively onstage in a wedding dress. Then came her marriage to Penn, which was marred by reports of domestic violence and his assault of a photographer — behavior that landed him a month's jail time and eventually led to the couple's very public divorce.

READ MORE: Madonna’s Now-Famous 'Like a Virgin' Performance Was Thanks to a Wardrobe Malfunction

'Like a Prayer' Music Video

In 1989, Madonna's "Like a Prayer" video aired on MTV as part of a lucrative Pepsi endorsement. The video featured interracial relationship themes, burning crosses and a blending of sexual innuendo and religious ideologies. As a result of the video, Pope John Paul II urged fans not to attend her concerts in Italy, and Pepsi pulled their endorsement of the star.

Despite the public outcry, Madonna had become more popular than ever. The Like a Prayer album spawned a No. 1 title track as well as additional hits like "Express Yourself," "Cherish," "Keep It Together" and "Oh Father." By 1991, she had achieved 21 Top 10 hits in the United States and sold more than 70 million albums internationally, generating $1.2 billion in sales. Committed to controlling her career, Madonna helped found Maverick Records, a label under the Warner Music Group, in April 1992.

'Truth or Dare' Documentary

She also continued to gain attention by pushing social boundaries. First came the film Truth or Dare (1991), a revealing documentary about her Blonde Ambition tour. This was followed by the publishing of Sex (1992), a soft-core pornographic coffee-table book featuring the pop star in a variety of erotic poses. Despite its controversial nature, Sex sold 150,000 copies on the day of its release in the United States alone. Three days later, all 1.5 million copies of the first edition were sold out worldwide, making it the most successful coffee table book ever released.

The album Erotica (1992) was unveiled at the same time and proved equally successful. By the end of 1993, the album had reached double-platinum status. Bedtime Stories came next in 1994, with its groovy lead single "Secret" and the beautifully melancholic "Take a Bow."

READ MORE: 10 of Madonna's Most Controversial Moments

Movies and Music: Late 1990s - Present

'evita,' 'immaculate collection' and 'music'.

By 1996, Madonna had proven her versatility as a star in both film and music. She starred in the critically acclaimed screen adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Evita (1996), which also featured Antonio Banderas . She won a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Comedy or Musical, and in the film she performed "You Must Love Me," which earned an Academy Award for Music, Original Song.

Madonna had released the greatest hits album The Immaculate Collection in 1990, following that years later with Something to Remember (1995), a round-up of her balladry that included the new song "You'll See." In 1998, she released Ray of Light , a critically-acclaimed outing that had her delving into electronica and spiritual exploration with the help of producer William Orbit. More hits came in the form of songs like "Frozen" and "The Power of Good-Bye." Madonna also earned three Grammys, two for the Top 5 title track and one for the Ray of Light album itself.

Then came Music (2000), another successful electronic project, this time with more overt, unpredictable dance leanings and the bulk of production handled by French whiz Mirwais. She also continued her work with Orbit, as seen on a couple of Music tracks and the Grammy-winning homage to 1960s-psychedelia, "Beautiful Stranger," part of the soundtrack for the movie Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me .

'American Life'

The pop star then made the move from the big screen to the London West End stage in the play Up for Grabs (2002) and wrote her first children's book, The English Roses , which was published in 2003, the same year as the release of her album American Life . Madonna was inducted into the inaugural U.K. Music Hall of Fame in 2004, and her next album Confessions on a Dancefloor came out the following year. Around this time Madonna became the artist with the most gold-certified singles in the United States, beating The Beatles ' longstanding record.

Her professional life continued to boom: In January 2008, she was named the world's wealthiest female musician by Forbes magazine. Madonna earned much of this income from her H&M clothing line, a deal with NBC to air concert footage and her Confessions tour — the highest-grossing tour for a female artist to date. She also continued to sing, act and manage a number of business interests, splitting her time between the United Kingdom and the United States.

She was the writer and executive producer of I Am Because We Are, a documentary about the lives of Malawi's AIDS orphans, and the art-house film Filth and Wisdom , both with 2008 releases. Her album Hard Candy was released in April of the same year, and her Sticky and Sweet tour became her first major venture with concert promoter Live Nation.

'Celebration'

In 2009, she released a fourth greatest hits album, Celebration , which became Madonna's eleventh No. 1 album in the United Kingdom. With the release of the record, Madonna tied Elvis Presley as the solo act with most No. 1 albums in the United Kingdom.

'W.E.' Film, Super Bowl XLVI

In 2011, Madonna released her latest film project, W.E., about the American divorcée Wallis Simpson and her romance with Britain's King Edward VIII , contrasted with a more contemporary relationship. Edward gave up his crown to marry Simpson, and the couple became known as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Working behind the camera, Madonna co-wrote and directed this romantic drama, which received decidedly mixed reviews. She, however, did pick up a Golden Globe for an original song she co-wrote and sung for the film, "Masterpiece."

Madonna received another lukewarm reception when it was announced she would be performing at Super Bowl XLVI in February 2012. Ahead of the show, many football fans complained about her selection as part of the halftime entertainment. She put on an impressive show, however, which featured her latest single "Give Me All Your Luvin'." This time around, it wasn't Madonna who created waves during the show. Her musical guest, M.I.A., provoked an outcry when she used an obscene hand gesture in her live performance.

Madonna released her studio album, MDNA , in March 2012. On her tour to support the record, she courted controversy. Madonna occasionally flashed her audiences and used Nazi imagery while performing in France. At a concert in St. Petersburg, Russia, she spoke out in support of LGBT rights, which had landed her in legal trouble. She was sued for more than $10 million for breaking a law against promoting homosexuality to minors, but charges were later dismissed.

Tumultuous Road to 'Rebel Heart'

Through 2014, Madonna was reportedly at work on her next album, said to be collaborating with producers like Avicii and Diplo as seen via Instagram. In December of that year, however, more than a dozen songs planned for her 2015 album Rebel Heart were leaked online. An Israeli singer was later arrested and indicted for the thefts related to the leak.

To counterattack the theft, Madonna released six songs online before Christmas, with the tracks reaching the Top 10 of iTunes' charts in various countries. However, more controversy followed in January when the singer released via Instagram doctored portraits of prominent leaders and artists like Nelson Mandela and Bob Marley bound by black chord, mirroring the cover art of her forthcoming album. In February 2015, there was another album leak of Rebel Heart .

That month, Madonna also performed lead single "Living for Love" live at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards with a bull and matador theme. More than two weeks later, she performed the song at the Brit Awards, but fell down a short flight of stairs due to a wardrobe mishap, with the singer later reporting that she had suffered from whiplash.

The official version of Rebel Heart , Madonna's 13th full-length release, was released on March 10, 2015, with the deluxe version consisting of 19 tracks. The album was noticeably more stylistically diverse than its predecessors in terms of musical production, lyrically veering from vividly sexual provocation and contemporary boasting to quieter reflection.

After confirming she was working on new music in early 2018, the iconic singer revealed in an April 2019 video announcement that studio album No. 14 would be titled Madame X .

"Madame X is a secret agent," she says in the video. "Traveling around the world. Changing identities. Fighting for freedom. Bringing light to dark places. She is a dancer. A professor. A head of state. A housekeeper. An equestrian. A prisoner. A student. A mother. A child. A teacher. A nun. A singer. A saint. A whore. The spy in the house of love. I’m Madame X."

Soon afterward, Madonna released the single "Medellín," a joint effort with Colombian singer Maluma, and the duo teamed up to deliver a steamy performance of the song at the 2019 Billboard Music Awards.

Personal Life and Children

Madonna was married to actor Sean Penn from 1985 to 1989. Madonna became a mother in 1996, giving birth to Lourdes Maria (Lola) Ciccone Leon, whom she had with her lover and personal trainer, Carlos Leon. In 2000, she married British director Guy Ritchie and gave birth to their son, Rocco John Ritchie, the same year. Madonna and Ritchie split in 2008.

On the eve of her 50th birthday in 2008, Madonna faced more challenges in her personal life. She spent much of the previous year fighting allegations that she circumvented traditional Malawi laws to bring home her newly adopted son, David Banda, whom she had been raising since 2006. Critics accused Madonna of using her vast wealth to fast-track the adoption process, a charge she vigorously denied. A coalition of 67 local rights groups challenged the interim custody order on the grounds that existing laws in Malawi do not allow for international adoptions.

Madonna's application to permanently adopt the boy was approved by Malawai's high court on May 28, 2008, the pop star's lawyer said. "It's a beautiful and positive judgment," Alan Chinula told reporters. "Finally the court has granted Madonna full adoption rights of the boy. ... It's all over, thank God." She decided to adopt from Malawai again, and in June 2009, after another legal battle, she was granted custody of Mercy James.

In February 2017, Madonna announced she had adopted 4-year-old twins, Estere and Stelle, from Malawi, posting a photo with the girls on her Instagram account.

In 2017, Madonna attempted to legally halt the auction of several of her personal items, then in the possession of ex-personal assistant Darlene Lutz. However, the singer had previously signed a release from "any and all" future claims against her former friend and employee, and as a result, a judge ruled that the disputed auction could continue the following year.

The list of personal items included panties and a hairbrush, but the one that drew the most attention was a break-up letter from former boyfriend Tupac Shakur . In the letter, the rapper expresses his feelings that while dating a Black man likely boosted her reputation for being "exciting," he only stood to suffer for being involved with a white woman. "I never meant to hurt you," he writes. "Please understand my previous position as that of a young man with limited experience with an extremely famous sex symbol."

In August 2018, Madonna sparked more headlines with her tribute to the recently deceased Aretha Franklin at the MTV Video Music Awards. After mentioning that Franklin "changed the course of my life," Madonna launched into a lengthy sidebar about her own early music career, setting off critics who wondered why she was using the tribute to talk about herself.

QUICK FACTS

• Birth Year: 1958
• Birth date: August 16, 1958
• Birth State: Michigan
• Birth City: Bay City
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Female
• Best Known For: Pop legend Madonna is known for her constant reinvention as a performer. Her biggest hits include "Papa Don't Preach," "Like a Prayer," "Vogue," "Secret," and "Ray of Light," among many others.
• Documentary
• Astrological Sign: Leo
• Rochester Adams High School
• University of Michigan
• Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Madonna Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/musicians/madonna
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: March 26, 2021
• My mother was a religious zealot. There were always priests and nuns in my house growing up.
• I think the biggest reason I was able to express myself and not be intimidated was by not having a mother.
• I really saw myself as the quintessential Cinderella.
• For some reason, I feel like I never left high school, because I still feel that if you don't fit in, you're going to get your ass kicked.
• I believe sometimes we aren't always in charge of everything that we do creatively. We submit to things as we're going on our own journey.
• We like to put people on a pedestal, give them one character trait, and if they step outside of that shrinelike area that we blocked out for them, then we will punish them.
• One of my father's famous quotes—and I love him dearly, but he's very, very old-fashioned—was, 'If there were more virgins, the world would be a better place.'
• Every year it's a different me.
• If you want to affect change in the world, you do have to have a platform to stand on. And in order to have a platform to stand on, you have to keep doing your job.
• I think it's kind of a waste of time to provoke just for the sake of provocation. I think you have to have a lesson or something that you want to share.
• I sometimes think I was born to live up to my name. How could I be anything else but what I am having been named Madonna? I would either have ended up a nun or this.
• I want to be like Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, and John Lennon... but I want to stay alive.

Famous Musicians

Sean “Diddy” Combs

Carrie Underwood Is Expanding Her Music Empire

Céline Dion Gives Emotional Health Update on IG

Tyler Childers

Amy Winehouse

Justin Timberlake

The Best Music Documentaries

10 Facts About “Need A Favor” Singer Jelly Roll

Is Madonna a game-changing feminist or capitalist come-on? A biography hashes it out

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

Madonna: A Rebel Life

By Mary Gabriel Little, Brown: 880 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Mary Gabriel’ s new biography of Madonna is a bookshelf hog. Clocking in at more than 700 pages, not counting a bibliography that could be its own stand-alone volume, “ Madonna: A Rebel Life ” uses ballast as a statement of intent, a way of telling the reader before they crack the spine that this is a subject worthy of the kind of assiduous attention given any other great 20th century artist. That is absolutely right, though the result is an alternately fascinating and lumpy account of a singular career.

Gabriel, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a former Reuters reporter, has left no stone unturned, but if Bob Dylan can have multiple warehouses of books written about him, surely we should have a full-dress account of Madonna Louise Ciccone , a generational talent who challenged our notions of sexuality and gender while she was reeling off a brilliant series of singles over a 40-year run. Still, this very large book is just a bit too much.

Entertainment & Arts

Madonna’s in on those face jokes and feeling ‘cute,’ weeks after Grammys backlash

Madonna wants fans, and critics, to see ‘how cute I am now,’ weeks after her appearance at the 2023 Grammys drew backlash.

Feb. 21, 2023

As tends to be the case with music bios, the first third of the book, when Gabriel deftly lays out the modest roots of Madonna’s global ascendancy, is the most compelling tranche. Raised in a middle-class Catholic household in Pontiac, Mich., by a strict father — a scenario not dissimilar to her 1986 music video for “ Papa Don’t Preach ” — she chafes against religion and tilts to the noise of rebellion.

“Madonna lived a double life,” writes Gabriel. “One intensely sad and angry and insecure, the other a ballsy bravado performance for public consumption.” For her eighth-grade talent show, she covered her clothes in fluorescent-green paint and danced to The Who’s “ Baba O’Riley ” as her disgusted father averted his camera.

Her insecurity melts away as she finds her footing as a dancer. According to Gabriel, under the tutelage of her Ann Arbor instructor Christopher Flynn, “the disparate pieces that would become Madonna the artist came together: sex, dance, and musical performance.” But Michigan is too small for Madonna’s global pursuits, and she makes the obligatory pilgrimage to New York in the late ‘70s — armed with an acceptance letter from Alvin Ailey ’s dance troupe and a small amount of money earned cleaning houses, among other odd jobs.

New York was, of course, the right place at the right time. Madonna befriends Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat , Fab Five Freddy and Jenny Holzer — artists who circumvent the traditional gallery route and take their art straight to the people. This is how Madonna will do it, as well. Having written a few songs with her Michigan boyfriend Stephen Bray, she makes a beeline for taste-making club Danceteria and persuades its star DJ Mark Kamins to spin her song “Everybody.”

The Madonna Complex : You don’t have to tell her it’s been a rocky couple of years. ‘Sex’ fizzled, ‘Erotica’ disappointed, and the movies bombed. Does she think her grip on pop culture loosened?

These have not been an easy two years for Madonna.

Oct. 23, 1994

The floor clogs up with dancers, Madonna among them. Kamins contacts Sire’s A&R rep Michael Rosenblatt, who sends the demo tape straight to Lenox Hill Hospital, where Sire’s chairman Seymour Stein is recovering from a heart infection. “As penicillin dripped into my heart, I lay there and listened,” Stein recalled years later. He summons Madonna to his hospital bed, and a record contract is consummated.

From there, Madonna’s bullet train jumps the fast track. She masters the nascent art of music video and dominates MTV with instant classics: “Borderline,” “Crazy for You,” “Burning Up.” There is the arresting bustier-and-tulle performance of “Like A Virgin” at the 1984 MTV Music Video Awards, where millions of viewers are convinced they have caught a glimpse of Madonna en deshabille.

She had become a star and a symbol — but of what, exactly? Parsing Madonna’s cultural impact has long been a kind of parlor game among humans who think about such things (there are many of us, I assure you). Has she wielded her sexuality like a self-made cudgel? Or is it merely a consumer come-on? Gabriel rightly comes down on the side of the angels: For the author, Madonna has worked hard to stake a claim to her own kind of feminism, a performer who regards sex as a source of strength rather than exploitative shame.

“In mocking the social covenant that traditionally codified a woman’s status as lesser,” Gabriel writes, “she declared liberation not in the language of feminist politics but in the language of sex.”

Madonna and her split personality

With much more serious choices pending for Americans at the polls in just a couple of days, the side-taking game surrounding Madonna’s collapsed marriage is trivial at best.

Nov. 2, 2008

After winning over New York, Madonna in short order takes over the world, while also shaping the world’s view of itself. When the AIDS epidemic tears through New York’s gay community, taking with it many of her closest friends, Madonna is the first pop star of her stature to speak up about the necessity for research and a cure. Today, that might be called “getting out in front” of a social issue, but Madonna was a crucial beacon of AIDS awareness at a time when the president of the United States had yet to acknowledge the existence of the disease.

With Madonna, though, it all comes back to forward motion. In the 1990s she continues to find new terrain to explore alongside producers William Orbit and Diplo while constantly revising the rules of music video’s vocabulary, in the process becoming the most influential visual artist of her time.

As the years progress and Madonna acquires the icon mantle, Gabriel is intent on enumerating every recording session, video shoot and world tour in great detail, making this book a slog at times. After 1990, when Madonna has become a fixture of our collective consciousness, the stakes aren’t quite as high as they once were. There is also the matter of critical analysis, which is mostly offered second-hand from other sources. There is a lot to like about and learn from “Madonna: A Rebel Life”; the depth of your “Madge” worship will determine whether you will go the distance with it.

Marc Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: W i lliam Mulholland, California Water, and The Real Chinatown.”

More to Read

50 years after Candy Darling’s death, Warhol superstar’s struggle as a trans actress still resonates

March 18, 2024

Madonna accused of ableism after ‘politically incorrect’ flub about fan in wheelchair

March 11, 2024

Madonna’s Celebration tour is a messy victory lap that needs more razzle-dazzle

March 5, 2024

Sign up for our Book Club newsletter

Get the latest news, events and more from the Los Angeles Times Book Club, and help us get L.A. reading and talking.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

The week’s bestselling books, April 7

April 3, 2024

3 best mystery books to read this spring

L.A. author Kathryn Scanlan wins $175,000 literary prize: ‘Baffling and wonderful’

April 2, 2024

‘I’m a liar. I’m a thief. I’m capable of almost anything.’

• facebook-rs

Inside Madonna’s Legendary Performance at the First VMAs

By Mary Gabriel

Mary Gabriel

One writer compared Madonna ’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards in September of 1984 to iconic music moments like Elvis Presley causing jaws to drop in living rooms across America with his “pelvic thrusts” on The Milton Berle Show in 1956, and the Beatles’ few minutes on The Ed Sullivan Show in February of 1964, which created the template for the ensuing 20 years of pop-rock music. Another observer called it “the award-show equivalent of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address — the ideal against which all successors would be measured.” It was, in other words, unforgettable.

Rather than one of the tracks from her first album, Madonna wanted to sing the still-unreleased single “Like a Virgin.” Her first idea was to perform with a Bengal tiger (she had apparently soured on lions after her experience making a video for that song in Venice). When the tiger was a no-go for obvious reasons, she suggested emerging from a wedding cake, as she had at Studio 54 for a Fiorucci 15 th anniversary bash when she tumbled out of a cake singing “Everybody.” The VMAs ’ producers agreed.

Editor’s picks

The 250 greatest guitarists of all time, the 500 greatest albums of all time, the 50 worst decisions in movie history, every awful thing trump has promised to do in a second term.

From a distance, Madonna looked appropriately bridal atop the cake , singing a song that no one except the people who heard her debut the song at New York’s Paradise Garage earlier that year had ever heard. It was a song about a virgin, sung by a woman wearing a bustier-and-tulle wedding dress and a belt that identified her as a Boy Toy. As she made her way down the cake, the unimaginable became undeniable as she began to shed her bridal wear: first shoes, then veil; after which she loosened her hair, boudoir-style. Madonna likes to say that what happened next, when she famously rolled around the stage, skirt up, panties and garters exposed for all the world to see, was her attempt to retrieve a lost shoe.

That was the official story, which may be how she remembered it, or it may have been a bit of damage control, because Madonna’s handlers believed she had gone too far. Such behavior — which would have been perfectly acceptable, even mild, at Danceteria or the Garage or Studio 54 — was considered beyond outrageous at the MTV Video Music Awards show. The lost shoe story provided handy cover. But that’s not what happened.

Could 'Into the Groove' Be Madonna’s Best Song?

Madonna will end 'celebration tour' with massive free show in brazil, art williams went from forging $100 bills to a career as an artist.

Christopher Ciccone watched from the Radio City green room, thinking of his father and grandmother, who, like millions of other TV viewers, would see the show at home and be stunned by what appeared to be the on-air despoliation of a bride — by herself.

In mocking the social covenant that traditionally codified a woman’s status as lesser, she declared liberation not in the language of feminist politics but in the language of sex. Madonna in her wedding attire claimed that power as her own. Just the year before, Time magazine declared that the sexual revolution was over. Madonna showed that for women of her generation, it hadn’t even begun.

In the full unpublished transcript of an interview Edwin Miller conducted with Madonna for Seventeen magazine not long after the VMA show, she described what her actual thinking may have been going into that night, and it was an interesting take on the notion that the promise of marriage and the reality of marriage are two very different things. She said she imagined herself on top of the cake “sitting on top of the world,” but she “ended on the ground, broken.”

Whatever her plan had been, Madonna was pilloried in the press and by some of the other artists in the hall. Melody Maker quoted Annie Lennox as calling her performance “very, very whorish . . . It was like she was fucking the music industry. It might have been parody on her part, but I thought it was very low.”

Recalling the event years later during an appearance on Howard Stern’s radio show, Madonna said that when she found her manager Freddy DeMann afterward, he was “white as a ghost. And he looked at me and said, ‘Do you know what you just did?’ . . . ‘Your career is over.’ . . . I was just starting out and I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’ . . . I wasn’t that apologetic. I was just like, ‘Well, fuck it, I made a mistake.’”

Cyndi Lauper , who was in the audience and was familiar with both worlds, recognized Madonna’s segment for what it was. “I loved that — it was performance art,” she said. Lauper was right. Madonna was not merely a pop singer; she was also part of a rich tradition of creative women who used everything they had in their art, who simply were their art. Madonna’s performance about women, marriage, and sexuality arose out of that milieu. But most people didn’t get it.

The VMAs would be the first of many episodes in Madonna’s career in which she expressed herself using the methods common in the New York art world only to suffer the wrath of public opinion. The verdict time and again would be that she had gone too far, that her career was over. Time and again, the jury was wrong. Madonna’s actions earned her detractors, to be sure, but they also earned her loyal fans and increased attention.

Maripol, who had stood behind a curtain onstage watching Madonna, told writer Lyndsey Parker , “I knew that day she had made it. Every journalist was rushing, running, going, ‘Oh my God, who is this girl with the white outfit rolling and crawling on the floor, with crosses in her ears, and her name is Madonna?’” “When we left, the kids were waiting for Madonna in the street, cheering,” Maripol said, describing the scene for The Face ’s Jeffrey Ferry. “As we went into the limo, I was watching her. She was looking at all the kids, and she was wondering why she was here. She wanted to be there, with them, in the street, yelling at herself. And I looked at her face, and it was pure innocence and pure joy.”

A young French fashion designer in the audience was excited by the performance, too. Jean Paul Gaultier told Charlotte Cowles in The Cut that he was surrounded by “mostly businesspeople, who were horrified. There were just a few young fans — and me, who absolutely loved it. That is when I realized that she couldn’t care less what others thought of her, and I also saw how powerful she was.”

Nancy Pelosi Among 40 House Democrats Demanding Biden Halt Weapon Transfers to Israel

Cole brings plenty, budding actor on ‘yellowstone’ spinoff '1923,' found dead, the far right is crawling with eclipse conspiracy theories, taylor swift soundtracks the five stages of grief with new apple music playlists.

It was also when MTV’s VMAs became “must-be TV.” Bob Pittman, one of MTV’s founders, said, “The first year, it was everything we could do to get talent to come to the event and fill the seats. By the second year, every act wanted to be on the bill.”

Excerpted from the book MADONNA: A REBEL LIFE by Mary Gabriel. Copyright © 2023 by Mary Gabriel. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. New York, NY. All rights reserved.

See Arlo Parks Bring Alt Rock-Inspired 'Devotion' to 'Fallon'

• Late-Night Jams
• By Daniel Kreps

Olivia Rodrigo Brings Out Noah Kahan for Surprise 'Stick Season' Duet at MSG

• Manifesting
• By Charisma Madarang
• Tortured Playlists Department
• By Ethan Millman

J Cole Brought A Knife To A Gunfight On '7 Minute Drill'

• Shots Missed
• By Andre Gee

Doja Cat, Young Miko, Vampire Weekend and All the Songs You Need to Know This Week

• By Rolling Stone

Most Popular

Joaquin phoenix, elliott gould, chloe fineman and more jewish creatives support jonathan glazer's oscars speech in open letter (exclusive), barron trump’s super-rare outing with dad donald may show why we never see them together, georgia secretary of state sent letter to larry david over 'curb' voting law plot, partynextdoor reveals nsfw 'partynextdoor 4' album cover, you might also like, miptv to tackle ai concerns, fast channels and more industry issues, what 2024 nominees wore to their first cmt awards: kelsea ballerini’s flowing costarellos dress, kacey musgraves’ sparkling gomez-gracia minidress and more, the best medicine balls, according to fitness trainers, danny mcbride ‘can’t stand’ movie theaters that serve food and alcohol: ‘you’re going to have to piss’, irs letter an ‘indictment’ of nil collectives’ exempt status.

Rolling Stone is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Rolling Stone, LLC. All rights reserved.

Verify it's you

Please log in.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

The Meaning of Madonna

By Michelle Orange

It was a more physical world, though we thought it quite advanced. There seemed nothing “terrestrial” about twisting a radio knob to some eccentric decimal point, dialling static into song. In the summer of 1985, we all knew someone, usually an older sibling, who owned a portable, cassette-playing stereo. The rest of us remained stuck catching Top Forty countdowns on AM radio, or playing, on our parents’ imperial turntables, the one or two LPs in our possession. Increasingly, we listened to music by watching it on TV, our dance parties often overseen by a strutting, tattered sprite who wore bangles like opera gloves and held the camera’s gaze with her entire being, as though locked in a dare she was not going to lose.

I liked her best in motion: the jut of her chin as she spun to a stop, the drag of her foot through a grapevine step. Something important seemed bound up in this vision, beaconlike but elusive, forever disappearing around a corner up ahead. I prized the “Like a Virgin” LP I received for my birthday, the adults involved having apparently thought little of giving the record to a Catholic girl who was, if anything, overfamiliar with talk of virgins and of being like at least one of them. In regular living-room sessions, I twirled and stretched before the hi-fi altar, arching toward God knew what, flashing on how doing my best Madonna might resemble discovering a radical style of my own, the curious fission of moving in time.

That year, I delivered the “Madonna: Why She’s Hot” issue of Time to my father with the same air of triumph that swirled about him an hour later, as he quoted its comparison of her voice to “Minnie Mouse on helium,” a line he liked so much that he repeated it for decades. It was my own budding sensibilities, I understood then, that would require defending; Madonna could take care of herself.

Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.

By the end of the eighties, Madonna was innovating the form she had invented: the female mainstream avant-pop performance-artist superstar. In 1990, Pope John Paul II described her Blond Ambition World Tour as “one of the most satanic shows in the history of humanity.” Soon after that, in an essay for The New Republic , the critic Lucy Sante observed how unbearably hard Madonna was working—and for what? Not to make good music, according to Sante, or even for the money, but “to conquer the unconscious, to become indelible . . . a mutable being, a container for a multiplicity of images.” The thought of this talentless “dynamo of hard work and ferocious ambition” making “yet another attempt to expand her horizons” wearied Sante, as did Madonna’s fan base, those “consumers,” mostly teen-age girls, “who may not think she’s a genius but admire her as a workhorse and career strategist.”

Indeed, we were aware of being lassoed into the narratives surrounding Madonna: the media fixation on how long this whole “mutable being” racket could last (“Madonna cannot afford to sleep,” Sante warned); the debates over her scandalous videos and queer-forward live shows, with their female-masturbation vignettes and men in floppy bullet bras. But, where the press took sidelong note of each album’s and each video’s shrewd “reinvention,” we thrilled to Madonna’s refusal to be defined, to her expression of the ambiguities that any alert citizen of the late twentieth century knew to be an essential condition of the time. In exchange for this bounty, we chose to ignore her lame accents, puerile antics, and strangely inert movie turns. Bound up in the music was a burlesque of female stardom, irresistible for its mergings and inversions, for its unlikely marriage of a powerful woman’s desire to “make it” and her will to create. The wish to become indelible in an image-mad age required that Madonna commit to a premise as shaky as it was central to her appeal: the act of looking and being seen as a form of voluptuous play, a process to be messed with freely, and with freedom—release, for all, into something fluid and new—as its end.

As a girl, I watched Madonna explore this possibility to its outer limits. At fifteen, I could dance every step of the Blond Ambition tour; I knew the contours of her body better than I knew my own. That sublime body, impossibly whittled, spring-loaded with muscle, pale to the point of phosphorescence, a monument to the wedding of her famous will to the forces beyond her control. Her message of self-determination and brute vitality needed a physical, transmissible form, and we agreed to believe that the camera only appeared to be feasting on her—that she would emerge from each feat of aesthetic derring-do intact and primed for the next. That we feared for her, and for the terms of our fascination, was inscribed into that bargain’s back pages. A reckoning for another day.

If not a reckoning, “ Madonna: A Rebel Life ” (Little, Brown), by Mary Gabriel, suggests something comprehensive: it is eight hundred and eighty pages, and is being published in rough conjunction with its subject’s sixty-fifth birthday, this past summer. Gabriel, the author of four other nonfiction books, most recently “ Ninth Street Women: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art ,” has brought her cultural historian’s eye to a project of apparent reclamation. Light on author interviews and other new source material, the biography is a towering work of assemblage, a guided tour through the origins and the creative life of “the enigma called Madonna,” with a view to solidifying her status as a leading artist of her time. That there exists some doubt about this forms a subtext of the book, which, like any biography, proposes a fragile patchwork of contracts with the reader in the name of mastering its subject and fulfilling its brief.

Gabriel, a former Reuters editor, organizes the chapters by dateline, taking an almanac-like approach, the idea being, more or less, that a thorough record of Madonna’s accomplishments will speak for itself. The result succeeds on the strength of that record and on the fine-toothed diligence with which Gabriel, who has claimed that she set out with no particular knowledge of or attachment to Madonna, combs through it. The tone is one of admiring dispassion, the approach at times discreet to the point of inertia. Readers hungry for original takes, fresh intel, or freewheeling analysis will remain so. Gabriel avoids risk and complication as fervently as Madonna has sought them out, spinning modest threads of historical, political, and cultural context that are never less than perfectly apt and rarely anything more.

In this telling, as in all others, Madonna Louise Ciccone’s bottomless hunger for love and recognition derives from the early loss of her mother, who died of breast cancer in 1963, when Madonna was five. Trapped in Pontiac, Michigan, in a chaotic, über-Catholic household choked by grief and teeming with children—after remarrying, Madonna’s disciplinarian father, Tony, added two kids to the six he already had—Madonna tried to find outlets for the fury building inside her. The whiter, more well-to-do Rochester Hills, where the family moved, in 1969, in the wake of the riots in Detroit, proved easy to loathe. Gabriel writes that Madonna, unable to fit in with her wealthier peers, “called junior high the start of the angriest period of her life.” It also marked the beginning of her performing career. At her school’s annual talent show, in her last year, Madonna and a friend performed an exultant hippie dance to the Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” their bodies painted with fluorescent pink and green hearts and flowers. Though she was clothed in shorts and a T-shirt, the spectacle horrified Tony Ciccone, who sat in the audience with his camera in his lap, failing posterity as his daughter had failed him.

Gabriel charts the ebb and flow of various cultural tides in the late seventies, when Madonna washed into Manhattan, a nineteen-year-old dance-school dropout with a ruling interest in the business of being somebody. Punk had ratified a new hierarchy, whereby with the right poses and “a strong physical presence,” as Patti Smith once said, “you can get away with anything.” Disco, a mirror-ball fantasia born of Black, Latin, and L.G.B.T.Q. night life, mixed genres in search of the most glamorous, danceable grooves; New Wave kept punk’s D.I.Y. spirit and its reliance on irony but divested it of its sneer. And then there was the dance music coming out of clubs like the Roxy and Danceteria, where Madonna spent her nights. With rap and hip-hop ascendant, d.j.s like Afrika Bambaataa wanted to create a sound that would merge uptown and downtown—“the black market and the punk rock market,” Bambaataa said. Gabriel credits his electro-funk track “Planet Rock,” from 1982, with jump-starting a more unified era in the city’s dance underground.

Unsure of much beyond her self-assurance, Madonna convinced various people of various things: that she could be the drummer in a rock band; that she could submit to the machinations of a Euro-pop factory; that she could be a rock goddess in the mold of Pat Benatar. The overseer of this last venture, a manager armed with lacklustre demos, quickly learned that bringing her client to record-label meetings was a must. According to Gabriel, the secret of selling Madonna was Madonna herself. But none of it felt right: by 1981, alienated from her own vision not just of success but of creative endeavor, Madonna had turned back to the dance floor, where the right song could forge an almost tribal affinity between people. “I think it’s in our nature . . . to want to join together and move to a beat,” she has said. “I wanted to make music that I would want to dance to.”

Link copied

In the early eighties, making danceable music, for Madonna, meant finding the right combination of synth-driven buoyancy and bass-and-drum churn. She didn’t write “Holiday,” an early dance hit, but its looping energy and exhortative lyrics are characteristic of her self-titled début, from 1983, which includes “Everybody,” “Burning Up,” and “Lucky Star,” her first Top Five single—all of which she wrote. In her vocal performance, Madonna projects what the producer of “Holiday,” Jellybean Benitez, called “a kind of innocence.” That playful, almost teasing quality—a refusal to go too deep—would become a hallmark of the early Madonna banger, each one a lipsticked invitation for listeners to take mischief and pleasure as seriously as she did. It was an attitude shared by the “art kid” crowd that Madonna ran with then, which included Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat . Her affair with the latter ended when Basquiat’s drug use began to overtake his focus, exuberance, and ability to find the joke, if not the joy, in a world of pain and ugliness.

In time, the right people bore witness to Madonna’s power to shift the axis of whichever room she entered. “I had never seen a more physical human being in my life,” Freddy DeMann, who worked with Michael Jackson before signing on as Madonna’s manager, in 1983, said. Some of Madonna’s earliest collaborators in the visual translation of that magnetism were women, including Mary Lambert, who directed the video for “Like a Virgin,” in 1984, and Susan Seidelman, the director of the feminist identity caper “Desperately Seeking Susan,” from 1985. With the exception of “Susan,” which taps directly into the early Madonna mystique, the force of her persona is largely absent in her film roles—though she was charming in a supporting role in “A League of Their Own,” also directed by a woman. In the wake of a miserable experience shooting Abel Ferrara’s “Dangerous Game,” which was released in 1993, Madonna said that her time in Hollywood kept bringing her “to the same conclusion: that I have to be a director. I feel like I’m constantly being double-crossed.” She went on to direct two movies, “Filth and Wisdom” and “W.E.,” but neither found much of an audience.

The songs endure: a layered, sonic eclecticism often powers a Madonna hit. In “Like a Prayer,” her mini revival meeting for the faithless, from 1989, gospel-choir harmonies and a church organ lay a hushed foundation for Madonna’s plangent vocals; the incantatory chorus shifts tempo into a silvery guitar riff, an urgent drum beat, and some absurdly funky bass; and the bridge rises alongside a steady build of Afro-Cuban percussion before the song spills open and down its own aisles, the chorus reprising as the song fades out. Though her strongest recordings stand alone, the Madonna experience always existed in combination: music and movement, image and sound. Where one element is absent, the whole project tends to falter. “ Sex ,” Madonna’s experiment in coffee-table-book erotica, from 1992, suffers for ignoring this principle. I gave a copy to a fellow-Madonnaphile on her birthday, a furtive transaction conducted in the parking lot of our Catholic high school, but didn’t buy one for myself. No amount of nudity or artfully deployed nipple clamps, I felt, could transcend the book’s constraints; her phenomenon had limits, and they would not budge.

Rebellion and submission can bear a strange resemblance; in this cross-fade, outsider artists who court the mainstream often get lost. From the start, Madonna has filed claims of misunderstanding, frustrated by the wider public’s inability to grasp either the winking ironies of “Material Girl” or the dead earnestness of her video for “Like a Prayer,” a memorable but incoherent visual stew of racism, cleavage, and stigmata. In a 2015 interview, Howard Stern described one of her recent songs, “Holy Water,” as being “about your vagina. You reference your vagina.” Madonna demurred: “Well, I say ‘pussy.’ But it’s a joke. It’s tongue in cheek.” “Well, listen, pussy is pussy,” Stern replied. “That’s it.”

And that is it: the problem of nuanced provocation, especially where female sexuality is concerned, in a patriarchal marketplace. Compared with a contemporary like Sinéad O’Connor —whom Madonna mocked after O’Connor’s famous indictment of the Catholic Church, despite being vilified by the Church herself—Madonna’s rebellions appear modest, even compromised. But they may make up in effect what they lack in magnitude. Gabriel adds necessary context and dimension to Madonna’s role in raising awareness of the AIDS epidemic, and to her choice to foreground a diverse and vibrant array of gay men—notably in the music video for “Vogue” (1990) and in “Madonna: Truth or Dare” (1991), a backstage chronicle of her Blond Ambition tour—at a moment when even the tolerant public associated gayness with a gruesome plague.

Somewhat perversely, Gabriel has Norman Mailer pose one of this story’s key questions: To what end does Madonna subvert, create, and persist as she does? Speaking with Mailer for an Esquire profile, in 1994, Madonna claimed that her revolution was “in the name of human beings relating to human beings.” Indeed, though often diminished as a fame-monger and a raging individualist, Madonna, in Gabriel’s view, pursues an autonomy that is always relational, that finds its highest, most generative expression in convergence. Her greatest loyalties are the most primal: Christopher Ciccone emerges as the book’s shadow hero, constant and long-suffering in his sister’s torrential wake. Gabriel interviewed Christopher, who was valued by Madonna for his exacting taste and style, and she also draws liberally from his 2008 memoir, “Life with My Sister Madonna.” For the first twenty years of her performing life, Christopher played a multipurpose role, decorating her homes and eventually directing her Girlie Show World Tour, in 1993. Though the bond frayed in time, its nature and longevity are characteristic of an artist who throughout her career has sought in acts of creative collaboration a more controlled version of the family she was desperate to escape.

Madonna’s personal life—including her two marriages, to the actor Sean Penn, in the eighties, and the director Guy Ritchie, in the two-thousands—figures into Gabriel’s account largely insofar as it affects her creative output. And though Gabriel emphasizes the relationships that have helped midwife Madonna’s work, she fails to make them intelligible: we get no sense of the artist’s grind, her habits and challenges as a songwriter, singer, producer, dancer, or director; or of how her vision and her ear have prevailed, in a decades-long evolution, through countless co-productions and genre dalliances. Old press-tour quotes on this subject are as illuminating as you might expect.

Stunned but not chastened by the media bonfire sparked by her “Sex” book, Madonna gravitated back to the dance floor, which, in 1994, meant dabbling in rave culture’s less sweaty, more ethereal side. Her album “Bedtime Stories” yielded the sublime “Human Nature,” a taunt addressed to her schoolmarm haters. The birth of her first child, Lourdes, in the fall of 1996, and a starring role in “Evita,” released that December, for which she won a Golden Globe, found Madonna on a restored, more respectable public footing. By 1997, when she recorded “Ray of Light,” an album she described as “drug music without drugs,” she was ready to reëmerge, at nearly forty: a yoga-loving, Kabbalah-devotee mom with new thoughts on the ego (it’s bad) but the same excellent nose for what’s next. Her work with the British producer William Orbit, particularly on the new album’s dazzling title song, proved revelatory, evidence of a talent more supple and abiding than her doubters had acknowledged.

In the past quarter century, Madonna has toured and recorded steadily, setting records into her fifties and redefining the scope of a female pop star’s career. Gabriel’s chapters on this period are clotted with reporterly descriptions of Madonna’s videos and road-show spectaculars, all of which, with the exception of the Madame X Tour, are available to view on YouTube . The Internet is the vast, unruly sea on which the latter half of this story is tossed, yet Gabriel describes it as one might a series of guideposts viewed from a passing ship deck. She notes Madonna’s decision, in 2007, to forgo a new record-label contract in favor of a hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar deal with the multi-platform entertainment conglomerate Live Nation; the online leaks of unfinished tracks from her album “Rebel Heart,” in 2015; and the replacement of serious criticism with the apelike opinionating of social-media discourse. Gabriel’s summary of the online response to a 2019 Madonna performance: “I love it. I hate it. She’s too old.”

In footage from rehearsals for her Confessions Tour, in 2006, a French-speaking dancer tells Madonna that as an artist he is visual, he likes to see. “You like to look at the art,” Madonna replies. “I like to be the art.” She smiles. “ Je suis l’art. ” The Internet and social-media culture could be said to have out-Madonna-ed Madonna: that billions of people now toil on various content paddies, fuelling great economic engines with the art of self-retail, is not disconnected from the golden age of pop celebrity that preceded it, or from the intricate bargains struck by that age’s brightest female star, who today competes for engagement alongside fans and detractors alike. Madonna’s ongoing commitment to making new things and making things new—and her organic way of going about it—now appears almost antiquated. The tension between her artistry and her status as an O.G. personality merchant only grows—for us, it seems, and for her. Madonna is hardly the first public figure, or older woman, to undergo plastic surgery, but her most recent transformation surprises for the way it has made her look not simply unlike herself but trapped, unfree.

On the upside, the best of Madonna is just a few clicks away. The clips tell their own tale, one that proposes, across four decades of feminist backlash, capitalist fervor, and techno-media glut, a politics of physicality, display, defiance, and pleasure. Madonna’s explicit forays into political statement (chief among them the album “American Life,” from 2003) have an awkward, redundant quality, like covering a block of Cheddar with spray cheese and calling it an improvement. Her true authority is innate, rooted in what those early fortune-makers could see from across the room: a woman’s determination, above all, to be free. As she has navigated certain meta-aspects of that liberty—what it means to succeed, to choose well, to live out one’s values—Madonna’s confusion has often resembled our own. What stands apart has something to do with her lifelong equation of freedom with movement and strength, and the mettle with which she has pursued all three. More than her talent or her cunning, Madonna’s success reflects a public’s ambivalence about those freedoms we cherish, even as they frighten, bewilder, and enthrall us. Her story is that of an artist committed to remaking certain old ideals: beauty, sovereignty, connection, grit. It also tells of how starved we were, and still are, for their pure embodiment. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

Searching for the cause of a catastrophic plane crash .

The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool .

Gloria Steinem’s life on the feminist frontier .

Where the Amish go on vacation .

How Colonel Sanders built his Kentucky-fried fortune .

What does procrastination tell us about ourselves ?

Fiction by Patricia Highsmith: “The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn, the Trouble with the World”

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Emily Witt

By Margaret Talbot

By Hanif Abdurraqib

By Skyler Higley

Biography Online

Madonna Biography

Short Bio of Madonna

Madonna, born Louis Cicconi on 16 August 1958, was brought up in Rochester Hills Michigan. Her mother died of breast cancer when she was only five; she was then brought up by her grandparents. Madonna was raised a Roman Catholic, though, from an early age, she displayed a rebellious streak. In 1978, she dropped out of college and moved to New York, with very limited resources. She got a job as a waitress at Dunking Donuts, and in her spare time learnt modern dance. She temporarily joined a rock band ‘The Breakfast Club’ and then tried to make a solo career. Her early attempts at singing gained a favourable impression with Sire Records, and she was given her first recording contract.

“I went to New York. I had a dream. I wanted to be a big star. I didn’t know anybody. I wanted to dance. I wanted to sing. I wanted to do all those things. I wanted to make people happy. I wanted to be famous. I wanted everybody to love me. I wanted to be a star. I worked really hard and my dream came true.”

– Madonna (Virgin Tour, 1985)

In 1982, she released her first single ‘ Everybody ‘, and in 1983, she launched her first album ‘ Madonna ‘ It sold very well, but it was her next album ‘ Like a Virgin ‘ which made her into an international superstar. The album sold over 12 million copies, helped by the hit single ‘ Like a Virgin ‘ which stayed at number one for six weeks. Other hit records included Papa Don’t Preach”, “Like a Prayer”, “Vogue”, “Take a Bow”, “Frozen”, “Music”, and “4 Minutes”. Madonna states that Marilyn Monroe has been an influence on her career. The video for the hit single “Material Girl” was a tribute to Monroe’s performance in the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes .

“I loved Carole Lombard and Judy Holliday and Marilyn Monroe. They were all incredibly funny … and I saw myself in them … my girlishness, my knowingness and my innocence.” – Madonna

As well as being a successful music recording artist, Madonna was very influential in influencing fashion and attitudes to life. Her trademark looks included fishnet stockings, a Christian cross, bleached hair and Capri skirts. Her early music videos, shown on MTV, were influential in cultivating the image of Madonna in popular culture.

“I think that life is a paradox and you have to embrace that in your work and your belief systems… you can’t be a literalist, and that’s the trouble that people always find themselves in. That’s why people always hit a wall with any of my stuff, because you can’t take it literally.”

– Madonna, Dazed & Confused , 29 Feb 2008

Throughout her career, Madonna has courted controversy for her mix of sexuality and religious imagery. Her attitudes sparked criticism from the Vatican, and the Church discouraged people from attending her concerts because of the eroticism. Madonna remained unapologetic and continued to perform her routines.

“A lot of people are just really confused by me; they don’t know what to think of me, so they try to compartmentalize me or diminish me. Maybe they just feel unsafe. But any time you have an overtly emotional or irrational, negative reaction to something, you’re fearing something that it’s bringing up in you.”

– Madonna

She has launched several business enterprises, such as fashion lines – Material Girl (1980s) and  ‘Truth or Dare by Madonna’ (2011)

Madonna has acted in a couple of films, without much commercial success – though her appearance in Evita (1996) about Eva Peron , the famous Argentinian wife of the President received good reviews. For her role in Evita, she received Golden Globe Award for Best Actress,

She has now produced over ten albums and remains a very influential artist still capable of hitting the top of the album charts. According to Billboard magazine, she is second only to the Beatles in terms of the all-time best-selling artist. In recent years, her music has evolved to include new styles. Her album True Blue (1986) incorporated aspects of classical music. In Music (2000) and American Life (2003), she experimented with folk and acoustic music. She produces and writes her own music, and has never conformed to a narrow vision of recording companies.

“I pay attention to what’s going on around me. I’m always looking for new energy, new talent, new voices. When you do that I think it’s easier to come up with fresh ideas. It’s not that my career has been based on surprising people, but it’s been about challenging myself — to constantly do new things that are going to broaden my own mind and in the process, hopefully, connect with other people.”

– Madonna, Parade magazine 24 June 2008

Her early Catholic roots influenced her music and videos, but, in the early 1990s, she embraced Kabbalah a Jewish mystical sect. In 2004, she adopted the Kabbalah name ‘Esther’ which in Persian means star. Talking about the meaning of Kabbalah, Madonna stated:

“That consciousness is everything and that all things begin with a thought. That we are responsible for our own fate, we reap what we sow, we get what we give, we pull in what we put out. I know these things for sure.”

In recent years, Madonna has continued to tour, release albums and engage in humanitarian work. In 2013, she realised a short film entitled Secretprojectrevolution – launched at the Art for Freedom initiative, which states it is seeking to promote “art and free speech as a means to address persecution and injustice across the globe”. She also supports an organisation ‘Raising Malawi’ a humanitarian organisation co-founded by Madonna and committed to building schools in an effort to end the extreme poverty of Malawi orphans. In 2017, she adopted two twins Esther and Stella Mwale from a Malawi orphanage

Madonna Marriage and Children

Madonna married Sean Penn in 1985 but divorced four years later in 1989. She re-married Guy Ritchie in 2000 and divorced in 2008.

Madonna has six children

• Lourdes Maria Ciccone Leon (1999) – with Carlos Leon.
• Rocco Ritchie (2001), with Guy Richie
• David Banda in 2006  (adopted from Malawi)
• Mercy James in 2009. (adopted from Malawi)
• Esther and Stella Mwale (adopted from Malawi)

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of Madonna”,  Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net. Published 4th February 2015. Updated 6 February 2018.

The Mammoth book of Madonna

The Mammoth book of Madonna at Amazon

Madonna: An Intimate Biography

Madonna: An Intimate Biography at Amazon

Albums of Madonna

• Madonna (1983)
• Like a Virgin (1984)
• True Blue (1986)
• Like a Prayer (1989)
• Erotica (1992)
• Bedtime Stories (1994)
• Ray of Light (1998)
• Music (2000)
• American Life (2003)
• Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005)
• Hard Candy (2008)
• MDNA (2012)
• Rebel Heart (2015)

Related pages

• Iconic Women
• Image: Madonna by David Shackbone CC
• Madonna.com

One Comment

I enjoyed this website it’s really useful

• March 15, 2017 5:20 PM
• By G’Niya

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Madonna by Mary Gabriel review – the definitive life of a pop colossus

The work of a cultural historian rather than a fan, this meticulous study puts the shape-shifting star in proper context

W hen Madonna Louise Ciccone arrived in New York from Michigan aged 19 in 1978, she had a small suitcase, a winter coat and $35 in her pocket. In an interview with the broadcaster Howard Stern years later, she would admit that she was frightened: “The massive scale of New York took my breath away … I was poised for survival … But I was also scared shitless and freaked out by the smell of piss and vomit.”

In the ensuing years, Madonna would experience grinding poverty, living in a succession of cockroach-infested apartments where addicts populated the hallways, and often going without food. Yet Whitley Setrakian, Madonna’s roommate at the University of Michigan, where both had studied dance, says: “I’ve never seen her so happy and so sure.” She recalls Madonna telling her: “Every day I’m here in this city I can’t stop thinking about all the days I haven’t been here. I feel like I’m running a race and everyone’s had a head start.”

This self-assurance, ferocious drive and refusal to let circumstances get the better of her echoes through Mary Gabriel’s doorstopper biography. The world is not short of books documenting the life of the queen of pop, though few have attempted it on such a mammoth scale. Coming in at more than 800 pages, the book leaves no stone unturned, and no song, music video, film, TV appearance, friendship or romantic liaison unanalysed, in its quest to understand the woman behind the global icon. This is Our Lady made flesh.

Gabriel, a former Reuters journalist, is the author of 2018’s Ninth Street Women , about five overlooked female artists, including Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, which provides a richly detailed account of the creativity of postwar Manhattan. In A Rebel Life, she delivers a similarly evocative portrait of New York in the late 1970s and early 80s, a grimy, neglected city of chancers and ne’er-do-wells, and a hotbed of art and hedonism. The book is peppered with contextual digressions into the history and politics of the era, from the anti-Vietnam protests and Stonewall to the pill, the Equal Rights Amendment , Roe v Wade and the Aids crisis.

Those who insist Madonna was purely interested in fame may adjust that view when presented with her campaign to educate the world about HIV and Aids at a time when her contemporaries, not to mention politicians, were either silent or loudly disgusted. A full year before the US government began distributing leaflets about Aids, Madonna – who lost scores of friends to the disease, including the artist Keith Haring – was putting pamphlets about safe sex in brochures at her live shows, risking her reputation and career in the process.

Other perceptions of Madonna – that she “stole” her ideas from queer and black culture, that she needs a man in the studio to make her sound good – are deftly dispatched. On her supposed co-opting of the ballroom scene with her 1990 single Vogue , the author notes that two of the scene’s leading lights, Luis Camacho and José Gutierez , appeared in the song’s video and went on to tour with Madonna.

Gabriel’s writing is unfussy and direct – the approach of a cultural historian rather than fan – while delighting in details such as Madonna getting fired from her job at New York’s Russian Tea Room for wearing fishnets, or sticking her tongue in Al Pacino’s ear after meeting him as a bolshy 20-year-old.

The figure who emerges is inevitably contradictory: serious, funny, generous, inconsiderate, hard-working, restless, blinkered, self-possessed, stubborn. This is a story not just of hit records, reinvention and headline-grabbing controversy, but about how a young working-class woman, traumatised by the early death of her ultra-religious mother, rose to become a cultural colossus and thorn in the side of the conservative right and the Catholic church. Underpinning the narrative are the repressive patriarchal systems that Madonna relentlessly challenged and her unwavering belief in the right to self-expression.

after newsletter promotion

Along with music, that self-expression also found an outlet in film, with decidedly mixed results. There can be no better illustration of Madonna’s doggedness than her acting career, where the howling duds (Who’s That Girl?, Body of Evidence, Swept Away, The Next Best Thing) vastly outnumber the critical and commercial smashes (Desperately Seeking Susan, Evita). Yet on she went, determined to prove her critics wrong.

It’s a mark of Gabriel’s skill that she has managed to wrestle this complex, sprawling, eventful life into a book that rarely flags and conveys its subject’s wider significance without tipping into hagiography. We come to understand Madonna the person as well as Madonna the concept: a woman who, for a generation, embodied female artistic, sexual and financial liberation.

“Just as the daughters of second-wave feminism, who had been taught that they were equal to their brothers, started learning that was not the case, they discovered Madonna,” writes Gabriel. “Her look gave them a rebellious way to express their simmering dissatisfaction and emerging defiance … The message wasn’t the 1970s ‘I Am Woman’ but a 1980s ‘I am free.’ But what did freedom look like? It looked like Madonna.”

• Biography books
• Book of the day
• Music books

Most viewed

Find cars that meet your safety needs with AARP Auto Buying Program powered by TrueCar. Learn more.

Popular Searches

AARP daily Crossword Puzzle

Hotels with AARP discounts

Life Insurance

AARP Dental Insurance Plans

Suggested Links

AARP MEMBERSHIP — $12 FOR YOUR FIRST YEAR WHEN YOU SIGN UP FOR AUTOMATIC RENEWAL

Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine.

• right_container

Work & Jobs

Social Security

AARP en Español

• Membership & Benefits
• AARP Rewards
• AARP Rewards %{points}%

Conditions & Treatments

Drugs & Supplements

Health Care & Coverage

Health Benefits

Staying Fit

Your Personalized Guide to Fitness

AARP Hearing Center

Ways To Improve Your Hearing

Brain Health Resources

Tools and Explainers on Brain Health

How to Save Your Own Life

Scams & Fraud

Personal Finance

Money Benefits

View and Report Scams in Your Area

AARP Foundation Tax-Aide

Free Tax Preparation Assistance

AARP Money Map

Get Your Finances Back on Track

Budget & Savings

Make Your Appliances Last Longer

Small Business

Age Discrimination

Flexible Work

Freelance Jobs You Can Do From Home

AARP Skills Builder

Online Courses to Boost Your Career

31 Great Ways to Boost Your Career

ON-DEMAND WEBINARS

Tips to Enhance Your Job Search

Get More out of Your Benefits

When to Start Taking Social Security

10 Top Social Security FAQs

Social Security Benefits Calculator

Medicare Made Easy

Original vs. Medicare Advantage

Enrollment Guide

Step-by-Step Tool for First-Timers

Prescription Drugs

9 Biggest Changes Under New Rx Law

Medicare FAQs

Quick Answers to Your Top Questions

Care at Home

Financial & Legal

Life Balance

LONG-TERM CARE

​Understanding Basics of LTC Insurance​

State Guides

Assistance and Services in Your Area

Prepare to Care Guides

How to Develop a Caregiving Plan

End of Life

How to Cope With Grief, Loss

Recently Played

Word & Trivia

Atari® & Retro

Members Only

Staying Sharp

Mobile Apps

More About Games

Right Again! Trivia

Right Again! Trivia – Sports

Atari® Video Games

Throwback Thursday Crossword

Travel Tips

Vacation Ideas

Destinations

Travel Benefits

Beach vacation ideas

Vacations for Sun and Fun

Plan Ahead for Tourist Taxes

AARP City Guide

Discover Seattle

How to Pick the Right Cruise for You

Entertainment & Style

Family & Relationships

Personal Tech

Home & Living

Celebrities

Beauty & Style

TV for Grownups

Best Reality TV Shows for Grownups

Robert De Niro Reflects on His Life

Free Online Novel

Read 'Chase'

Sex & Dating

Spice Up Your Love Life

Navigate All Kinds of Connections

How to Create a Home Gym

Store Medical Records on Your Phone?

Maximize the Life of Your Phone Battery

Virtual Community Center

Join Free Tech Help Events

Create a Hygge Haven

Soups to Comfort Your Soul

AARP Smart Guide

Spring Clean All of Your Spaces

Driver Safety

Maintenance & Safety

Trends & Technology

How to Keep Your Car Running

We Need To Talk

Assess Your Loved One's Driving Skills

AARP Smart Driver Course

Building Resilience in Difficult Times

Tips for Finding Your Calm

Weight Loss After 50 Challenge

Cautionary Tales of Today's Biggest Scams

7 Top Podcasts for Armchair Travelers

Jean Chatzky: ‘Closing the Savings Gap’

Quick Digest of Today's Top News

AARP Top Tips for Navigating Life

Get Moving With Our Workout Series

You are now leaving AARP.org and going to a website that is not operated by AARP. A different privacy policy and terms of service will apply.

Go to Series Main Page

8 Surprising Facts About Madonna From Her New Biography

Author mary gabriel explores the 65-year-old icon’s career — and controversies — in ‘madonna: a rebel life’.

Sarah Elizabeth Adler,

It’s difficult to underestimate the impact of Madonna, 65, on American culture, particularly for the Gen Xers who first spied her cooler-than-cool look in her MTV videos for Borderline and Lucky Star . The Queen of Pop kept pumping out those chart-topping hits, while her evolving image influenced fashion and pushed boundaries for decades.

Enter Madonna: A Rebel Life, by Mary Gabriel (Oct. 10), author of, among others, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution . Her new book chronicles Madonna Louise Ciccone’s journey from suburban Michigan to no-last-name-necessary megastardom in exacting detail. Written without Madonna’s participation, it may be TMI for her more casual fans, but serious Material Girl devotees will surely eat up this weighty homage.

AARP Membership — $12 for your first year when you sign up for Automatic Renewal

While Madonna’s career highs (and lows) have been obsessively dissected for decades, Gabriel highlights some lesser-known aspects of her life and work. Among them:

1. She’s a classically trained dancer.

Known for her grueling tour performances, it’s no surprise that Madonna is a dancer by training. She started studying ballet in her teens and later earned a dance scholarship from the University of Michigan, but dropped out to move to New York and train under such top choreographers as Martha Graham and Pearl Lang. While she’d soon ditch her classical repertoire for sexier moves at New York hot spots like Danceteria and Studio 54, Madonna’s early dance training provided her with the discipline she would apply to building her music career in the years to come.

2. She was one of the “children of Warhol.”

Before she was the Queen of Pop, Madonna cavorted with king of pop art Andy Warhol and the up-and-comers of the NYC art world, including artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, whom she briefly dated (she even wrote her 1983 debut album in his apartment).

The trio of artists were all in the audience when Madonna’s first tour reached Radio City Music Hall, and Warhol and Haring attended her 1985 Malibu nuptials to actor Sean Penn. When Haring died of AIDS-related complications in 1990, Madonna dedicated the last U.S. show of her “Blond Ambition” tour to his memory, raising more than $300,000 for AIDS research.

AARP NEWSLETTERS

%{ newsLetterPromoText  }%

%{ description }%

Privacy Policy

ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT

3. She walked away from an early record deal.

In 1979, Madonna was scouted by two Belgian producers who wanted to bring her to Paris to record an album. Despite being hosted in all-out luxury (she had a driver and maid at her disposal), the then-21-year-old was miserable in the City of Light.

“All I wanted to do was make trouble,” she said, because she was stuck doing menial tasks over which she had no creative control. Claiming she wanted to return home for a vacation, she got the producers to pay for a round-trip ticket to the U.S. — and never returned to Paris.

$20 off a Walmart+ annual membership

4. Her brother was her closest confidant — until their falling-out.

As Gabriel tells it, Madonna’s younger brother Christopher Ciccone was the central male figure in the singer’s life for decades — not only her best friend but a trusted adviser who worked alongside her on tour, decorated her homes and became known as the problem-solving “pope” within Madonna’s circle of collaborators.

Sadly, relations between the two siblings seem to have deteriorated , with tensions reaching a fever pitch when Madonna objected to the release of his 2008 memoir, Life with My Sister Madonna . “It was not going to be an ‘I hate Madonna’ book,” Gabriel quotes the younger Ciccone as saying. “That’s not how I feel.”

5. No, she wasn’t looking for her shoe during her 1984 VMA performance.

Madonna famously offered a scandalous performance of “Like a Virgin” at the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards, during which she was broadcast rolling around suggestively onstage — an attempt, she later maintained, to retrieve a lost shoe.

According to Gabriel, however, the shoe story is just a cover. Instead, Madonna retrieved her shoes prior to getting horizontal and “rolling lustily on the floor.” 

LEARN MORE ABOUT AARP MEMBERSHIP.

6. She denies that she was ever physically abused by ex-husband Sean Penn.

Dubbed the “Poison Penns” by the tabloids, Madonna’s relationship with actor Sean Penn (her husband from 1985 to 1989) was strained by stalking paparazzi and Penn’s violent outbursts.

One persistent rumor, which Gabriel traces to a 1989 British tabloid report, is that some sort of violent incident took place between the couple in their Malibu home one New Year’s weekend. But Madonna denied allegations of physical abuse in a sworn statement in 2015, saying, “Sean has never struck me, ‘tied me up’ or physically assaulted me, and any report to the contrary is completely outrageous, malicious, reckless and false.”

7. The process of adopting her son David ‘crushed’ her.

In 2006, the now mother of six adopted her son David from the East African country of Malawi, where she had started to carry out philanthropic work for the nation’s orphans and other vulnerable children. What she wasn’t prepared for was the storm of criticism she would receive from human rights organizations (which tried to block the adoption in court), adoption activists (who claimed she was being given VIP celebrity treatment) and the media. The adoption pushback “crushed me,” Madonna said in a 2015 interview. “I have to say it was one of life’s great disappointments.”

8. She’s a major movie lover.

Madonna discovered foreign films as a student at the University of Michigan, prompting a lifelong passion for movies. She starred in hits including A League of Their Own (1992) and Evita (1996), directed the 2011 drama W.E. (about the romance between King Edward VIII and American socialite Wallis Simpson) and sprinkled classic Hollywood references throughout her projects. The 1989 Express Yourself music video, for example, was based on the 1927 silent film Metropolis . (She also acted in some serious duds, including 1986’s Shanghai Surprise , with Penn.)

According to the book’s epilogue, Madonna was slated to direct her own biopic, but recent news reports say that the project was put on hold earlier this year.

Sarah Elizabeth Adler joined aarp.org as a writer in 2018. Her pieces on science, art and culture have appeared in  The Atlantic , where she was previously an editorial fellow,  California  magazine and elsewhere.

Discover AARP Members Only Access

Already a Member? Login

More From AARP

‘Be Useful’ Excerpt: Arnold Schwarzenegger Takes Charge of His Recovery After Open-Heart Surgery

The tough-talking star’s new book is full of personal stories and advice for a more productive, purposeful life

BET’s Sheila Johnson Details Her Business Triumphs and Personal Betrayals in ‘Walk Through Fire’

America’s first Black female billionaire, 74, discusses her painful marriage, remarkable career and new memoir with AARP

Inside the Mind of Elon Musk: What We Learned From His Biography

AARP Value & Member Benefits

Calm Sleep, Meditation & Relaxation App

30% off a Calm Premium annual subscription

AARP Fitness Center

Workout videos, tips and tricks to help you on your fitness journey

Hollywood.com

5% off all movie tickets

AARP® Staying Sharp®

Activities, recipes, challenges and more with full access to AARP Staying Sharp®

SAVE MONEY WITH THESE LIMITED-TIME OFFERS

Find anything you save across the site in your account

These Are the Best Madonna Books

By Maura Johnston

At 60, Madonna has yet to write an autobiography. Some might say that she doesn’t need to—that the body of work she’s released over the past three-plus decades, the countless interviews she’s conducted, the speeches she’s given, and, more recently, her regularly updated Instagram stories should suffice as her statement on herself. But the appetite for books on Madonna is large, and the variety of approaches writers, editors, and photographers have taken to craft their portraits is a testament to how her career has both inspired and provoked. She’s a singular pop star with a body of work that ranks among the genre’s best. She’s also adept at getting and (this is the hard part!) keeping the public’s attention.

The books listed below represent some of the most essential writing about Madonna—her life, her loves, her travails, and even her music. They’re a useful snapshot of how the public took in her rise and reign, which was fueled by her charisma, cultural savvy, and doctorate-level knowledge of how the media works. Along the way, she ran into the roadblocks faced by so many women, particularly when it came to being taken “seriously,” but she handled them if not with grace, at least with enough guts to consistently come out on top.

(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)

The One Book That Has It All

Weighing in at 604 pages and jam-packed with facts, figures, track listings, and arguments, this book is a thorough, opinionated, saucy leap into Madonna’s career through 2015, with individual encyclopedia entries on songs, people, phrases, tours, and ideas, as well as interviews with fans and tons of photos. Author Matthew Rettenmund is a brilliant observer of pop and the quixotic ways it’s discussed in the mainstream. “People do not argue over the relevance of artists who are not relevant,” he (correctly) asserts in the entry for “Irrelevant,” which is a disguised broadside toward those who take an ageist tack while pooh-poohing Madonna in the 2010s. Meanwhile, the entry for “Hitler, Adolf” notes that the dialogue surrounding Madonna in the early 1990s was so out of control that the president of Boston University compared her “message” to those delivered by the notorious führer and Saddam Hussein. (“Huh?” Rettenmund replies.) Encyclopedia Madonnica 20 is a crowdfunded reference book that reaches many high-on-knowledge peaks and makes you wish Rettenmund—this time, backed by a publishing company—was masterminding an entire series of these on various appropriately notorious pop figures.

The Classy Overview

This 2007 biography (an updated version was released last month in the UK) is a good primer for those who want to follow Madonna’s first 50-ish years and the work she made over that time. Divided into three Catholicism-callback sections (“Baptism,” “Confession,” and “Absolution”), Like an Icon is more focused on how Madonna executed her art than on devoting all of its time to rehashing gossip-page dirt—a welcome respite from the usual way women in music were and are covered. O’Brien, whose other books include bios of Dusty Springfield and Annie Lennox, peppers her rundown of Madonna’s life with singular observations—like comparing 2003’s Madonna/Britney/Christina three-way VMAs smooch to a 1959 horror film in which a youth-obsessed woman eventually turns into a wasp—that keep things lively.

The Trash-Talking Version

Over the course of Madonna’s career, she’s inspired a slew of unauthorized biographies—mostly by men—that revel in scandal: Christopher Andersen’s 1991 book Madonna: Unauthorized rode the voyeurism she masterminded in her tour documentary Truth or Dare to headlines and Christopher Ciccone’s Life With My Sister Madonna is a glimpse of what Festivus at the Ciccone homestead might look like. But British rabble-rouser Andrew Morton’s 2002 tome Madonna comes out on top because of the way it truly revels in its scandal-seeking. Morton conducted some 70 interviews while in search of the story, and the New York-set parts of it feel as lived-in as a classic “Law & Order” episode. Though the book lines its path toward gossip bliss with a bit of clunky writing, as an example of how far writers and their publics wanted to go to find any hint of a monster lurking underneath a star, it’s notable.

The Syllabus

The phrase “Madonna Studies” popped up in the late 1980s, when observers tried to get a handle on the then-rapidly-exploding subset of pop-cultural-savvy academics, and Desperately Seeking Madonna reads like a course packet from a theoretical early-’90s class on Madonna. It includes curiosities like an in-depth reading of her star chart and a cheeky rundown of Los Angeles restaurants where she’d been spotted (“Allegedly ordered steak and had food fight,” reads the entry for the now-shuttered West Hollywood boîte Le Dome), hit-and-miss gag pieces (including a “Truth or Dare”-themed Roz Chast cartoon), a poem by Henry Rollins, gossip doyenne Liz Smith rolling her eyes at then-recent “controversial” bios, and a couple of interviews with Madonna herself. The real meat is in the essays; bell hooks’ incisive “Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister?” and Luc Sante’s power-focused “Unlike a Virgin” are particular standouts. 

The Chance to Hear Madonna Speak

One common thread throughout books about Madonna is that most of them don’t include exclusive first-person interviews with her. While that allows for more wiggle room as far as what stories are told, it makes the Madonna quotes that do appear hover in the air a bit. This compendium of Madonna-related works from the pages of Rolling Stone provides an as-it-happens timeline of her career’s first half, with reviews, interviews, and other assorted mentions (she went to David Lee Roth’s birthday party in 1984!), ranging from the 1983 Madonna review that called out “that silly little catch in her voice” to the 1996 semi-pan of the Evita soundtrack. The interviews are the real draw, though, as they provide up-close peeks at Madonna’s journey from downtown Manhattan scenester to global domination; “Mothers of Invention,” a Mim Udovitch-helmed “women in rock” roundtable featuring Madonna alongside Tori Amos, Courtney Love, Joan Jett, Meshell Ndegeocello, Luscious Jackson’s Kate Schellenbach, the Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, and Babes in Toyland’s Kat Bjelland is particularly instructive both in its oh-so-’90s roster and the fact that Madonna’s final quote still rings true: “I think progress is being made, but it’s very, very slow.”

The Picture Book That Shocked the World

“Savvy Artist Pushing Limits of Exposure,” read the subtitle of a 1992 Billboard piece about Madonna’s latest media blitz; written to mark the chart debut of the playfully sex-forward Erotica , it cast a skeptical glance toward the one-two punch of that album and her first book, a coffee-table romp through carnal bliss. “Observers of pop culture and managers of other cutting-edge artists agree that Madonna’s new ventures have upped the ante for what is considered acceptable sexual imagery in the cultural mainstream,” the magazine noted, and with this book, at least, they were understating the case. Even now, when the internet makes the distribution of NSFW videos easy, some of the shots and scenarios in Sex are a bit beyond. Shot by Steven Meisel in New York and Miami, and written from the perspective of Madonna’s “Mistress Dita” character, the Mylar-wrapped, metal-covered Sex features the star and other participants in various stages of flagrante , with fetish objects including whips, chains, bunny tails, and Vanilla Ice.

The Madonna-Adjacent Memoir

Other books that are “about Madonna” take a more personal tack, from her brother’s family-feuding memoir to Alina Simone’s odd 2016 tome Madonnaland , which largely focuses on the author’s frustration with fame (fair!) and whether or not Madonna’s hometown of Bay City, Michigan, would give its most famous spawn their prized key. Written by Whit Hill, who lived with Madonna in a University of Michigan dorm for a few months, this one flits along, breezily chronicling how, after Madonna split town for New York and fame, Hill balanced life’s everyday demands with keeping her dance practice in shape, motherhood, and the utter weirdness of being pop-culture marginalia. “My knowing Madonna has been like the world’s largest, most persistent mosquito, or like a dissertation you were supposed to hand in years ago and just can’t quite wrap your head around,” Hill writes. Thankfully, this book is not especially Kafka-like; it’s funny and smart, with a healthy perspective on celebrity and being “lucky” that’s particularly useful today. 

The Iconic Early Photographs

In the early ’80s, Madonna’s aesthetics reflected the chaotic vibe of pre-gentrification New York City, in which high and low culture commingled in smoky night spots with only one goal: seeing what happened next. Photographer Richard Corman, fresh off an apprenticeship with behind-the-lens legend Richard Avedon, met Madonna in circumstances that almost seem made up; his mother was casting for Martin Scorsese’s biblical epic The Last Temptation of Christ , and she insisted that Madonna, who’d read for a role, sit for her son. These early pictures of Madonna around New York’s crumbling buildings and vibrant neighborhoods showcase how the streetwise cool, mix-and-match fashion, and camera-challenging gaze that made early videos like “Borderline” MTV staples were an es

By Isabelia Herrera

By Jazz Monroe

By Madison Bloom

By Nina Corcoran

By Alphonse Pierre

• Born August 16 , 1958 · Bay City, Michigan, USA
• Birth name Madonna Louise Ciccone
• The Material Girl
• The Queen of Pop
• Lola Montez
• Queen of Reinvention
• Lil' Booty
• Veronica Electronica
• Mrs. Ritchie
• Queen of Controversy
• High Priestess of Pop
• First Lady of Pop
• Kit Moresby
• Height 5′ 3½″ (1.61 m)
• The remarkable, hyper-ambitious Material Girl who never stops reinventing herself, Madonna is a seven-time Grammy Award-winner who has sold over three hundred million records and CDs to adoring fans worldwide. Her film career, however, is another story. Her performances have consistently drawn scathing or laughable reviews from film critics, and the films have usually had tepid, if any, success at the box office. Born Madonna Louise Ciccone in August 1958 in Bay City, Michigan, she moved to New York in 1978 and studied with renowned choreographer Alvin Ailey , joined up with the Patrick Hernandez Revue, formed a pop/dance band called Breakfast Club and began working with then-boyfriend Stephen Bray on recording several disco-oriented songs. New York producer/D.J. Mark Kamins passed her demo tapes to Sire Records in early 1982 and the rest is history. The 1980s was Madonna's boom decade, and she dominated the music charts with a succession of multimillion-selling albums, and her musical and fashion influence on young women was felt around the globe. Madonna first appeared on screen in two low-budget films marketed to an adolescent audience: A Certain Sacrifice (1979) and Vision Quest (1985) . However, she scored a minor cult hit with Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) starring alongside spunky Rosanna Arquette . Madonna's next effort with then husband Sean Penn , Shanghai Surprise (1986) , was savaged by critics, although the resilient star managed to somewhat improve her standing with her next two films, the off-beat Who's That Girl (1987) (although she did receive decidedly mixed reviews, they weren't as negative as those of her previous effort) and the quirky Damon Runyon -inspired Bloodhounds of Broadway (1989) . The big-budget and star-filled Dick Tracy (1990) had her playing bad girl "Breathless Mahoney" flirting with Warren Beatty , but the epic failed to catch fire at the box office. Taking an earthier role, Madonna was much more entertaining alongside Tom Hanks and Geena Davis in A League of Their Own (1992) , a story about female baseball players during W.W.II. However, she again drew the wrath of critics with the whodunit Body of Evidence (1992) . Several other minor screen roles followed, then Madonna starred as Eva Perón in Evita (1996) , a fairly well received screen adaptation of the hugely successful Broadway musical, for which she received a Golden Globe for Best Actress. The Material Girl stayed away from the movie cameras for several years, returning to co-star in the lukewarm romantic comedy The Next Best Thing (2000) , followed by the painful Swept Away (2002) . If those films weren't bad enough, she was woefully miscast as a vampish fencing instructor in the James Bond adventure Die Another Day (2002) . After finally admitting that her acting days were over, Madonna began a directing career in 2008 with the barely remembered Filth and Wisdom (2008) and a year later she reunited with Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991) director Alek Keshishian to develop a script about the relationship between the Duke of Windsor and the Duchess of Windsor that led to his abdication in 1936: the result, a movie named W.E. (2011) , starring James D'Arcy and Andrea Riseborough as the infernal but still royal couple, was released in 2011 to lukewarm critics but it gathered one Oscar nomination for costumes and won the Golden Globe for Best Original Song for "Masterpiece". - IMDb Mini Biography By: [email protected]
• Spouses Guy Ritchie (December 22, 2000 - November 21, 2008) (divorced, 2 children) Sean Penn (August 16, 1985 - September 14, 1989) (divorced)
• Children Rocco Ritchie David Ritchie Mercy James Ciccone Stella Ciccone Estere Ciccone Lourdes Leon
• Parents Madonna Louise Fortin Silvio Ciccone
• Relatives Anthony Ciccone (Sibling) Martin Ciccone (Sibling) Paula Ciccone (Sibling) Christopher Ciccone (Sibling) Melanie Henry (Sibling)
• Wore cone-shaped bras during her Express Yourself and Vogue performances
• For each of her albums she has a different look
• Gap between her front teeth
• Jean Harlow -styled short, bleach-blonde hair
• Muscular and toned arms
• Was first introduced to her husband Guy Ritchie by Sting & Trudie Styler at their Country Estate. Trudie Styler and Sting were later made godparents of their first born son Rocco Ritchie .
• In October 2013 she received a lifetime ban from the Alamo Drafthouse theatre chain after texting incessantly during a screening of 12 Years a Slave (2013) .
• In 2017, delivery company FedEx refused to give Madonna her package for a week, believing she was an impostor.
• Was fired from her job as an elevator operator at Terrace on the Park for having sex with a waiter in the elevator. She only worked there two weeks.
• Her daughter Lourdes was named as a tribute to Madonna's mother, who wanted to visit Lourdes, France, where the Virgin Mary, the Madonna, appeared in 1858, but died before doing so.
• [in the Los Angeles Times, October 1994] When I'm hungry, I eat. When I'm thirsty, I drink. When I feel like saying something, I say it.
• Children always understand. They have open minds. They have built-in shit detectors.
• [in Interview magazine, June 1993] I think that everyone should get married at least once, so you can see what a silly, outdated institution it is.
• [from her book "Sex"] A lot of people are afraid to say what they want. That's why they don't get what they want.
• [to David Letterman in March 1994] Listen, all you do is talk about my sex life on your show, so now you don't want to talk about my sex life when I'm on your show?!
• Evita (1997) - $1,000,000
• Body of Evidence (1993) - $2,500,000 (plus percentage of gross and wardrobe)
• Dick Tracy (1990) - $35,000
• Shanghai Surprise (1986) - $1,000,000
• Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) - $80,000

Contribute to this page

• Learn more about contributing

More from this person

• View agent, publicist, legal and company contact details on IMDbPro

More to explore

Recently viewed

• Life & Culture

How Madonna is honoring an artist with Tampa Bay ties on her Celebration Tour

• Gabrielle Calise Times staff

Former Tampa Bay resident and artist Martin Burgoyne was just 23 when he died due to AIDS-related complications. His old friend Madonna is making sure he is remembered.

When the pop superstar came to Amalie Arena on Thursday for her long-awaited Celebration Tour, the event included a tribute to victims of the AIDS epidemic that features Burgoyne. According to the New York Times , Burgoyne’s face was the first shown in a montage set to the 1992 song “Live to Tell.”

Madonna first dedicated the song to Burgoyne during an AIDS benefit concert at Madison Square Garden in 1987 — the year after he died. Five years later, she wrote “In This Life” about Burgoyne and her first dance teacher Christopher Flynn, who also died during the AIDS crisis.

“Sitting on a park bench, thinking about a friend of mine,” she sings. “He was only 23. Gone before his time.”

Burgoyne was born in England and spent part of his adolescence in the Tampa Bay area. In 1980, he won several scholastic art awards for the portfolio he built as a Seminole High School student, according to Tampa Bay Times archives. Burgoyne’s photorealistic graphite portrait represented his body of work at a “surprisingly sophisticated” display at Tyrone Square Mall.

“He loved anything vintage and shopping at La France in Ybor,” said Sam South, a Seminole-based Madonna fan. “A couple years later he’s in the Lower East Side, hanging out with the biggest artists of America in the past 50 years.”

When Burgoyne moved to New York City in the early 1980s to study art at the Pratt Institute, he befriended Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, South said. He also became Madonna’s best friend, tour manager and roommate.

“She and Martin lived around the corner from me on the Lower East Side in a building with medieval black iron gates on the doors and dark narrow hallways that stank of urine and dead vermin,” wrote then-Miami Herald dance critic Jordan Levin in 2001.

Levin described Burgoyne as “much beloved and lusted after, an incandescent boy even in the darkest after-hours club.” Burgoyne worked as a bartender at Lucky Strike and Studio 54, South said, and managed Madonna’s first club tour and created the artwork for her 1983 single “Burning Up.”

Planning your weekend?

Subscribe to our free Top 5 things to do newsletter

You’re all signed up!

Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started.

Mary Dowd, who co-owns Myers Fine Art and Antiques Auction Gallery in St. Petersburg, noted that Burgoyne was a backup dancer during Madonna’s debut performance. He also designed the cover of the 1985 biography, “Madonna: Lucky Star.” That year, Burgoyne brought Warhol as his date to Madonna’s wedding to Sean Penn.

New York artist Trey Speegle remembered running into Burgoyne and his friends at events.

“It’s interesting to see how much creativity was swirling around,” said Speegle, who included a portrait of Burgoyne in his book, “80s Polaroids.” “AIDS was really ravaging the community at the same time. So it was fun, and it was also awful, because every month or every few weeks you’re going to someone’s memorial or someone’s hospital bed.”

Burgoyne thought he had contracted measles in the summer of 1986, but soon discovered he had AIDS-related complex. Warhol and Haring both contributed original artwork to advertise a benefit event at the Pyramid Club. The New York Times covered the September event, documenting over 500 friends in attendance, including Madonna.

Burgoyne died on Nov. 30 that year.

“Madonna paid for a memorial service where we all wept and got drunk,” Levin wrote in the Miami Herald. “She wasn’t at the party. But she was there for him — she held Martin’s hand as he died.”

Burgoyne’s parents retired in the Tampa Bay area. In 2014, Myers Fine Art auctioned pieces from Burgoyne’s life in New York. His parents kept his sketchbooks, which included drawings that would become the “Burning Up” cover, and Polaroids of Burgoyne and his famous friends.

Some photos may have been taken by Warhol, Dowd said. One Polaroid of Burgoyne and Madonna in a pink wig fetched over $5,500.

The auction attracted attention beyond Tampa Bay, with The Associated Press picking up the story and buyers as far away as Miami participating. Two women even showed up dressed like Madonna.

“(His parents) did say Madonna was very good to Martin and to them,” Dowd said. “She was a steadfast friend. It made me have an all-new appreciation for her.”

Gabrielle Calise is a culture reporter who covers music, nostalgia and offbeat Florida trends. Reach her at [email protected].

MORE FOR YOU

• Advertisement

ONLY AVAILABLE FOR SUBSCRIBERS

The Tampa Bay Times e-Newspaper is a digital replica of the printed paper seven days a week that is available to read on desktop, mobile, and our app for subscribers only. To enjoy the e-Newspaper every day, please subscribe.