Madonna (Madonna Louise Ciccone)
[key], 1958–, American pop singer and actress, b. Bay City, Mich.
She trained as a dancer at the Univ. of Michigan before moving to New York
City to begin her music and dance career. Her albums
Madonna (1983) and Like a Virgin
(1984) secured her position as a sexual and pop icon. She also pursued a
career as a film actress, winning critical praise for her parts in
Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Dick Tracy
(1990), and the musical Evita
(1996). Truth or Dare (1991) was a revealing backstage
performance film that paved the way for her
book Sex (1992), which garnered enormous publicity. In the
late 1980s-‘90s, “Madonna Studies” arose as a part of
academic courses on feminism, women’s studies, and popular culture.
She has provoked controversy for her use of Christian iconography in the
video for her song “Like A Prayer” and also by staging an
onstage kiss with fellow singers Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera at
the 2003 MTV music awards. To date, she has sold over 300 million records
worldwide and is the highest-grossing solo touring artist of all time. She
is also a successful entrepreneur owning her own recording company, and has
branched out to cosmetics and fashion ventures. Madonna was inducted into
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008. She founded the Ray of Light
Foundation in 1998 to focus on women’s issues and global development,
and Raising Malawi in 2006 to support orphaned children in that country.
See biographies by R. Taraborerelli (2001) and A. Morton (2002); memoir by C. Ciccone
(2008); studies by K. Faith, Madonna; Bawdy and Soul
(1997), A. Simone, Madonnaland (2016), C. Schwichtenberg,
ed., The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics,
Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theory (2019).
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