Diana Ross (born Diane Ernestine Earle Ross on March 26, 1944) is an American twelve-time Grammy and Oscar-nominated singer, record producer and actress, whose musical repertoire spans R&B, soul, pop, disco and jazz. During the 1960s, she helped shape the sound of popular music and the Motown Sound as lead singer of The Supremes before leaving for a solo career in the beginning of 1970. During the 1970s and through the mid 1980s, Ross was the most successful female artist of the rock era, while crossing over into film, television and Broadway winning a Tony Award for her one-woman show, An Evening with Diana Ross in 1977, and being nominated for twelve Grammy Awards and an Academy Award for Best Actress for her 1972 role as Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues. She was also recently honored by The Kennedy Center.In 1976, Billboard magazine named her the "Female Entertainer of the Century." The "Guinness Book Of World Records" declared Diana Ross as the most successful female music artist of the 20th century with a total of eighteen American number-one singles: twelve as lead singer of The Supremes and six as a soloist. Ross was the first female solo artist to score six number-ones. She is also one of the few artists to have two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame--one as a solo artist and the other as a member of the trio "The Supremes."
Ross was born at Women's Hospital in Detroit, Michigan on March 26, 1944. For a time, the Ross family lived on Belmont Street in northern Detroit - directly off of Woodward Avenue - where Ross befriended neighbor Smokey Robinson. When Ross was seven, her mother contracted tuberculosis. Ross' father moved his children to live with relatives in Bessemer, Alabama. After her mother recovered, her family moved back to Detroit. When Diana was fourteen years old, the family moved into the Brewster-Douglass projects. The following year, Ross began her music career with neighborhood friends Mary Wilson, Florence Ballard, and Betty McGlown as the doo-wop quartet the Primettes (later renamed The Supremes), a sister group to local act The Primes (later The Temptations).Please visit http://www.diana-ross.mobi for more infomation.
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