Born on August 9: Whitney Houston, exceptional voice and tragic destiny

She was born in 1963 in Newark, New Jersey, and first made a name for herself as a model.

Whitney Houston was spotted by an agency talent scout while shopping with her mother on the streets of New York in 1980, just before her seventeenth birthday. For a few years, American teen magazines such as "Seventeen," "Young Miss," "Mademoiselle," and even "Cosmopolitan" vied for her and what a photographer who worked with her once called "a million-dollar smile."

Her modeling career obviously couldn't withstand the whirlwind unleashed by her self-titled debut album in 1985: 30 million copies sold, thirteen times platinum, and three number ones on the Billboard charts. She even won a Grammy Award for Gospel. Also a cousin of singer Dionne Warwick, her mother probably saw a career in show business more favorably. Since her adolescence, the latter had regularly enlisted her as a backing singer in her band. The path was thus clear, but for her family, a school diploma was essential before a professional career could be considered. In 1982, she took the microphone for "Memories" by the often-described punk-jazz band Material, then signed to the French label Celluloïd. Its simplicity makes it undoubtedly one of her finest performances. Nothing syrupy, nothing bombastic here...

The early years of Whitney Houston's career resembled a fairy tale. Everything seemed to go her way. Until 1992 and her role opposite Kevin Costner in "The Bodyguard," she climbed the ladder of fame one by one. Even the pathetic attempt at pseudo-seduction by a drunken Serge Gainsbourg, muttering "I want to f**k you" live on the set of the "Champs Elysées" show in Paris in April 1986, didn't stop the hit machine. Although host Michel Drucker saw it as a global scandal, fortunately limited due to the lack of social media's echo chamber!

It's easy (perhaps a little too easy) to detect in her 1992 marriage to singer Bobby Brown the beginnings of a descent into hell. She would eventually leave him for abuse in 2006. The sinister individual, who has also been incarcerated several times, clearly led her down a path of drugs, alcohol, and especially cocaine. Whitney Houston died in the bathroom of room 434 at the Beverly Hilton on February 11, 2012, following a cocaine binge.

(MH with Stéphane Soupart - Photo : © Etienne Tordoir)

Photo: Whitney Houston on stage at Forest-National in Brussels (Belgium) on October 10, 1986