Who

A diva par excellence, the trilling pop singer's impressive vocal range is often overshadowed by her always-precarious mental health and social life.

Backstory

Born on Long Island to an Irish-American mother (an opera singer and vocal coach) and half-black/half-Venezuelan father (an engineer), Mariah sang opera around the house as a little girl and later started skipping high school to go on auditions. After barely graduating high school—and completing "500 hours" of beauty school, which she paid for with stints sweeping hair in salons and as a coat check girl—she landed a gig as a backing vocalist for Brenda K. Starr, the Puerto Rican/Jewish dance/pop performer who earned about eight seconds of fame in the late 1980s before disappearing into the void. But it was thanks to Starr that Carey's solo music career took off—Starr passed along Mariah's demo to Sony Music chief Tommy Mottola at a party and, according to legend, he was so impressed with what he heard riding home in his limo, he had the driver immediately turn around so he could sign her to a deal.

Unfortunately, Tommy came along with the record contract and over the next few years, he carefully molded Mariah's image, which may very well explain why she's never been quite the same since. (See below.) In 1990, she released her self-titled debut LP, which earned her four No. 1 singles, including "Vision of Love" and "Love Takes Time." With a Best New Artist Grammy in hand, she released another smash in 1991, the album Emotions. A handful of mega-successful albums followed including 1993's Music Box (which featured "Dreamlover" and "Hero"), 1995's Daydream (featuring the earworm "Always Be My Baby"), and 1997's Butterfly, the title of which commemorated her split from Mottola the same year.

Of note

Carey possesses extraordinary range (five octaves, reportedly) but it wasn't her artistry or her originality that turned her into the best-selling female pop star of all time with more No. 1 singles than any other female solo artist. A brilliant showgirl with sugary, radio-friendly tracks, good looks, and a persona crafted by the same man who managed to turn a heavily-accented Canadian (Celine Dion) and tone-deaf Bronx back-up dancer (Jennifer Lopez) into superstars, Carey was as much a creation of the 1990s music marketing machine as anything else.

But following her break-up from Mottola, her career took a nosedive. She reinvented herself as an R&B performer on the 1999 album Rainbow, but sales were disappointing and Columbia later dropped her from its roster. Carey seemed to fall upward—Virgin signed her to an unheard-of $80 million contract in 2001. But things only got worse when her sanity evaporated and her bid for big-screen credibility with Glitter turned into one of the year's most memorable train wrecks, with an equally disastrous soundtrack. In early 2002 Virgin bought out her contract for $28 million and she inked a more modest deal with Island/Def Jam, following up with yet another bomb that same year, Charmbracelet.

She managed to turn things around in 2005 with help from a new manager (Benny Medina), Def Jam's L.A. Reid, and a cast of big-name collaborators like Kanye West and The Neptunes: The Emancipation of Mimi was both a critical and commercial success, earned her 10 Grammy nominations, and the single "We Belong Together" spent 14 weeks at No.1 on the charts. She's since unveiled a perfume called M by Mariah Carey, released a new hit record, E=MC2, and married a man more than 10 years her junior. There's plenty more to come: She's expected to appear in no less than four movies over the course of 2008.

Medical file

Mariah suffered a series of mental breakdowns following her departure from Columbia Records and the unraveling of her career in 2001-2. During one very public meltdown in 2001, she published loopy messages on her website ("I just can't trust anybody anymore right now because I don't understand what's going on") and nearly stripped off her clothes on the set of MTV's TRL while passing out popsicles to the audience. There were later rumors of a suicide attempt and she was eventually hospitalized at a psychiatric facility, the Silver Hill Hospital in Connecticut. (Her beleaguered publicist, Cindi Berger, described it as a mere case of "exhaustion.")

She's not the only member of the family with issues. Carey's estranged sister, Alison, was a crack addict and prostitute and contracted HIV before losing custody of both her kids. Alison, who once claimed her work as a hooker paid for her sister's lifestyle when she was just starting out as singer, tried to sell a tell-all memoir, describing Mariah as a "vain and heartless multimillionaire." (It was never published.) In 2005, Alison was arrested for soliciting an undercover cop in Suffolk County, her second prostitution arrest.

The look

Carey maintained her image as a wholesome princess during her Columbia Records days, but following her divorce she tried to re-craft her image by slutting it up with skin-tight dresses and low-cut tops. Unfortunately, that's led her to make some really, really tragic fashion decisions. Nothing, though, competes with what she's been doing for the past couple of years to cover up the lack of a six-pack. She's been having her abs airbrushed on.

Personal

Carey married Tommy Mottola in 1993. The lavish affair, held at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue, featured 50 flower girls, a Vera Wang wedding dress with a 27-foot train, and a diamond-encrusted tiara perched on the diva's head. The marriage lasted four years, with Carey splitting from her controlling Svengali in 1997. (They divorced in 1998.) During the late '90s and early '00s, she was linked to Latin singer Luis Miguel, the similarly ethnically ambiguous Yankees star Derek Jeter, and Mark Sudack, a member of her management team. In April 2008, in what we're sure had absolutely nothing to do with efforts to promote her new album, she married significantly younger rapper Nick Cannon in the Bahamas.

Habitat

Carey lives in a 12,000-square-foot triplex in Tribeca that cost her $9 million in 1999. The gold-and-pink apartment, decorated by Mario Buatta, features a room filled with the Hello Kitty memorabilia she's collected and received from fans over the years. It's also home to Carey's collection of 1,000 pairs of shoes as well as Marilyn Monroe's childhood piano, which the diva purchased for $662,500 at Christie's in 2006. Some 20 humidifiers surround her bed—to protect her throat from dry air—and her television is behind glass to keep the moisture out.

Carey also has a home in LA and the Bahamas—she paid $4.8 million for the Caribbean retreat in 2007. She rented Tommy Hilfiger's house in East Hampton during the summer of 2007, and she spends every Christmas in Aspen.