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| Birth Name(s) : Sheena Easton |
Date of Birth: N/A |
| Status:
Single
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Partner:
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| Profession:
Singer, Performer, Actress Songwriter |
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Full Sheena Easton Biography
Sheena Easton (born Sheena Shirley Orr on April 27, 1959, Bellshill, North Lanarkshire, Scotland) is a Scottish Grammy Award-winning pop singer and theatre & television actress. Sheena became famous for being the focus of an episode of the United Kingdom television programme The Big Time, a 1980 reality TV series which recorded her attempts to gain a record contract and got her a deal with EMI. Sheena has sold over 4 million albums in the US alone in her whole career and has 14 Top 40 smash hits on the Billboard Hot 100.
In 1969, Easton's father died. Her mother took on work as a laborer to support the family. Easton's web site states that her mother was always available for her children, despite her tremendous workload: "Sheena always speaks very highly of her mom and the wonderful job she did in raising her and her siblings, including teaching each of them all to read at home before they were even enrolled in school."
She had not seriously considered entering upon a singing career until a viewing of the movie The Way We Were, with Barbra Streisand. Streisand's singing over the opening credits "overtook" the young Scottish girl and convinced her that what she wanted most was to be a singer and to have that kind of effect on others. Her top grades in school earned her a scholarship to attend the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, and she trained there from 1975 to 1979 as a speech and drama teacher by day, while singing with a band called 'Something Else' by night at local clubs. She chose to study teaching rather than performing, because it was a course of study that would let her perfect her craft as a singer.
Her second marriage, in 1984, was to Rob Light, a talent agent, but ended after 18 months. Easton earned U.S. citizenship in 1992 and adopted her first child, Jake in 1994. Two years later, she adopted again, this time a baby girl named Skylar. In the summer of 1997, she met producer Tim Delarm, while filming an episode of ESPN Canon Photo Safari in Yellowstone National Park and later married Delarm in Las Vegas July of 1997. The marriage lasted one year. In 2001, she became engaged to John Minoli, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and married him on November 9, 2002. They divorced in 2003 and Easton has been a single mother to her two children since and currently resides in Las Vegas.
Her first single, the disco-tinged soft-synth-pop tune "Modern Girl," was released in the UK before the show aired and reached a disappointing #56. At the end of the show, Sheena was still unsure of her future as a singer, but the question was soon resolved when, after the show aired, her second single, "9 To 5," soared up the UK Singles Chart to #3 in 1980. "Modern Girl" re-entered the chart subsequently and climbed into the top 10, and Easton, who had just a few months earlier been a virtual unknown, now found herself with two songs in the top 10 simultaneously.
In 1984, she began collaborating with Prince and made an Olivia Newton-John-like transformation into a sexy dance-pop siren. She was rewarded with the biggest-selling U.S. album of her career, A Private Heaven, and her fifth top 10 single, the sassy "Strut." She was also one of the first artists to have a music video banned because of its lyrics rather than its imagery, when some broadcasters refused to play the sexually risqué "Sugar Walls", which had been written for her by Prince (using the pseudonym Alexander Nevermind). "Sugar Walls" was also named by Tipper Gore of the Parents' Music Resource Council as one of the "Filthy Fifteen", a list of songs deemed indecent because of their lyrics, alongside Prince's own "Darling Nikki". "Sugar Walls" also hit #3 on the R&B singles chart.
Sheena Easton is the only artist in the history of the Billboard charts to have a top 5 hit on the Billboards key charts. AC, Dance, Pop, Country, and R&B.
In June 1998, her former secondary school Bellshill Academy celebrated its centenary. Easton signed a tribute to the school for its special occasion which is still on display in the main building. She was a pupil there from 1971-1977.
A popular story at the school was that there used to be a school desk that Easton had graffiti'd her then name "Sheena Orr" which was of some source of pride to the teacher whose classroom it belonged to. Upon returning from the summer holiday break a number of years later, the teacher was dismayed to find that the furniture had all been replaced and the signature strewn desk had gone.
1999-2000 saw New York based "One Way Records" attained the right to release all of Sheena Easton EMI-America catalog. For the first time in the US "No Sound But A Heart" was released. Two albums were Remastered (A Private Heaven, Do You) all with bonus tracks.
In April and May 2004, Easton visited Australia and featured in a kooky TV commercial for Connex in Melbourne. A number of unrealistically happy passengers in an unrealistically underpatronised morning train were singing "9 to 5". Easton boarded the train at Burnley Station, and screamed. The passengers paused in awe, then went on singing.
In July 2005, she played the Narrator in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at North Carolina Theatre in Raleigh, NC. The show co-starred Ray Walker as Joseph, Merwin Foard as the Pharaoh, David F.M. Vaughn as Reuben, Demond Green as Judah, and Darryl Winslow as Simeon. |
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