Madonna
How did Madonna’s music style evolve over the years?
Does Madonna support the LGBTQ community?
How many number one albums does Madonna have?
How many children does Madonna have?
How did Madonna influence the music video industry?
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Madonna (born August 16, 1958, Bay City, Michigan, U.S.) is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and entrepreneur whose immense popularity in the 1980s and ’90s allowed her to achieve levels of power and control that were nearly unprecedented for a woman in the entertainment industry. A major pop culture icon, Madonna is also known for her ever-changing fashion style, provocative public persona, and unflagging support for the LGBTQ community.
- Full name: Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone
- Occupation: Singer, songwriter, actress, entrepreneur
- Notable albums: Madonna (1983), Like a Virgin (1984), True Blue (1986), Like a Prayer (1989), Erotica (1992), Ray of Light (1998), Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005), Confessions II (2026)
- Notable films: Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Truth or Dare (1991), A League of Their Own (1992), Evita (1996)
In the 21st century she has remained a figure of controversy. Critics questioned her relevance as new generations of female singers surpassed her achievements on the charts and in record sales. Her highly sexualized image sparked debates about how older music artists, especially women, should publicly present themselves. In typical fashion, Madonna rejected such criticism and continued to embrace new trends and reinvent herself. In 2026, at age 67, Madonna released Confessions II, which became the 10th album of her career to top the U.S. charts.
Early life and rising star
Madonna was born into a large Roman Catholic family. Her father, Silvio Ciccone, was an engineer and a first-generation Italian American; her mother, Madonna Ciccone (née Fortin), was a homemaker of French Canadian heritage. In 1963, when Madonna was five years old, her mother died of breast cancer. She has said that this event, more than any other, drove her to pursue success and fame as an adult.
In high school Madonna found a mentor in her dance teacher, Christopher Flynn, who not only encouraged her as an artist but also exposed her to a community of like-minded people by taking her to a gay nightclub in Detroit. The experience was life-changing. In a speech at the 2019 GLAAD Media Awards, she said, “I finally felt like I was not alone, that it was OK to be different and to not be like everybody else. And that after all, I was not a freak. I felt at home, and it gave me hope.”
In the 1970s Madonna studied dance at the University of Michigan and with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City before relocating briefly to Paris as a member of Patrick Hernandez’s disco revue. Returning to New York City, she performed with a number of rock groups before signing with Sire Records. Her first hit, “Holiday,” in 1983, provided the blueprint for her later material—an upbeat dance club sound with sharp production and an immediate appeal.
Always ambitious and confident in herself, Madonna famously told Dick Clark in an appearance on American Bandstand in 1984 that she wanted “to rule the world.” The following year her fame continued to rise when she performed at the Live Aid benefit concert for famine relief in Ethiopia.
The meaning of Madonna: Music and videos
Early in her career, Madonna was criticized by some as being limited in range. Her sweet girlish voice nonetheless was well suited to pop music. Madonna’s melodic pop incorporates catchy choruses, and her lyrics concern love, sex, and relationships—ranging from the breezy innocence of “True Blue” (1986) to the erotic fantasies of “Justify My Love” (1990) to the spirituality of later songs such as “Ray of Light” (1998).
Significantly, Madonna was the first female artist to fully exploit the potential of the music video. She collaborated with top designers (Jean-Paul Gaultier), photographers (Steven Meisel and Herb Ritts), and directors (Mary Lambert and David Fincher), drawing inspiration from underground club culture or the avant-garde to create distinctive sexual and satirical images—from the knowing ingenue of “Like a Virgin” (1984) to the controversial red-dressed “sinner” who kisses a Black saint in “Like a Prayer” (1989).
Her videos are also acclaimed for the spotlight they put on dance and choreography. One of her best videos, for the single “Vogue” (1990), features her voguing, a style in which dancers strike poses in imitation of the fashion models pictured in magazines. The video helped popularize the dance style and brought attention to the queer Black and Latino ball culture that invented it, yet some critics accused Madonna of cultural appropriation.
By 1991 Madonna had scored 21 top 10 hits in the United States and sold some 70 million albums internationally, generating $1.2 billion in sales. Committed to controlling her image and career herself, Madonna became the head of Maverick, a subsidiary of Time Warner created by the entertainment giant as part of a $60 million deal with the performer. Her success signaled a clear message of financial control to other women in the industry, but in terms of image she was a more ambivalent role model.
Shifting gears to acting and film
In 1992 Madonna took her role as a sexual siren to its full extent when she published Sex, a soft-core pornographic coffee-table book featuring her in a variety of erotic poses. The book was released contemporaneously with the studio album Erotica, which explored the dark complexities of sex and love amid the AIDS crisis. Yet Erotica was overshadowed by Sex, and Madonna was criticized for being exploitative and overcalculating. Writer Norman Mailer said she had become “secretary to herself.”
Soon afterward Madonna temporarily withdrew from pop music to concentrate on a film career that had begun with a strong performance in Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), faltered with the flimsy Shanghai Surprise (1986) and uneven Dick Tracy (1990), and recovered with Truth or Dare (1991, also known as In Bed with Madonna), a documentary that follows her boundary-breaking Blond Ambition tour, and A League of Their Own (1992). The latter film, in which she played a player in a women’s baseball league during World War II, featured her 10th number-one hit, the nostalgic and tender “This Used to Be My Playground.” In the meantime, Truth or Dare came to be regarded as a seminal music documentary for its honest depiction of life on tour and of Madonna’s maternal relationship with her gay back-up dancers. The film was also praised for its positive representation of the LGBTQ community.
In 1996 Madonna scored massive success with the starring role in the film musical Evita, an adaptation of the stage musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice about the life of Eva Perón. For her performance she won a Golden Globe Award in the category of best actress in a comedy or musical motion picture.
Career resurgence with Ray of Light and Confessions on a Dance Floor
In 1998 Madonna released her first album of new material in four years, Ray of Light. A fusion of techno music and self-conscious lyrics, it was a commercial and critical success, earning the singer her first musical Grammy Awards, among them the award for best pop album (her previous win had been for a video). She won another Grammy the following year, for the song “Beautiful Stranger,” which she cowrote and performed for the movie Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999).
Madonna’s experimentation in electronica continued with Music (2000). In 2005 she returned to her disco roots with Confessions on a Dance Floor, a collaboration with British producer Stuart Price that took home the Grammy for best electronic/dance album and yielded the hit track “Hung Up.”
Personal life, later albums, and Confessions II
Madonna married actor Sean Penn in 1985; the couple was often a target of the tabloids, and they divorced four years later. In 1996 she gave birth to her first child, Lourdes, whose father is personal trainer and actor Carlos Leon. Madonna married English director Guy Ritchie in 2000; they had a son, Rocco, before divorcing in 2008. She later adopted four children from Malawi: David Banda, Mercy James, Stella, and Estere.
Despite her romantic relationships, Madonna remained resolutely independent. That independent streak, however, did not prevent her from enlisting the biggest names in music to assist on specific projects. This fact was clear on Hard Candy (2008), a hip-hop-infused effort with writing and vocal and production work by Justin Timberlake, Timbaland, and Pharrell Williams of the hit-making duo the Neptunes.
In 2008 Madonna embarked on the Sticky & Sweet Tour, which broke the record for the highest-grossing concert tour by a female performer, until it was surpassed by Beyoncé and then Taylor Swift in 2023. With MDNA (2012), which features cameos from rappers M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj, Madonna continued to prove herself a shrewd assimilator of cutting-edge musical styles. Rebel Heart (2015), featuring production work by Diplo and Kanye West and guest appearances from Minaj and Chance the Rapper, was an ode to her career. In 2019 Madonna released her 14th studio album, Madame X, which was inspired by her 2017 move to Lisbon, Portugal, and contained music influenced by Latin pop, art pop, and hip-hop. Although these albums performed well on the charts (MDNA and Madame X both reached number one), many critics viewed them as largely forgettable and accused Madonna of being a trend chaser rather than a trendsetter.
Madonna’s response was to launch the Celebration Tour, a retrospective of her musical legacy, in 2023. It wrapped up in Rio de Janeiro in May 2024 with a free concert on the beach that was attended by 1.6 million fans, making it the largest standalone concert event in history by a recording artist.
In April 2026 Madonna announced a sequel to Confessions on a Dance Floor that would reunite her with producer Stuart Price. Titled Confessions II, it was described by Madonna as a “manifesto” in a press release that declared, “The dance floor is a ritualistic space. It’s a place where you connect with your wounds, with your fragility. To rave is an art. It’s about pushing your limits and connecting to a community of like-minded people.” The announcement coincided with Madonna’s surprise appearance during the set of Gen Z pop star Sabrina Carpenter at the Coachella music festival in Indio, California, where the two icons debuted the duet “Bring Your Love.” Released that summer, Confessions II was hailed by critics as a return to form. Many of its songs took an autobiographical tone, exploring Madonna’s early days in New York City, the recent deaths of members of her, and her relationship with her daughter Lourdes, who appears on the track “The Test.”
Later film career and other projects
In addition to continuing to act in such movies as the romantic comedy The Next Best Thing (2000) and Ritchie’s Swept Away (2002), Madonna pursued work behind the camera in the 21st century. She cowrote and directed Filth and Wisdom (2008), a comedy about a trio of mismatched flatmates in London, as well as the drama W.E. (2011), which juxtaposed the historical romance between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII with the fictional story of a woman in the 1990s researching Simpson’s life.
Madonna also published several children’s picture books, including The English Roses and Mr. Peabody’s Apples (both 2003).
Charity work and honors
Early in her career Madonna became a tireless fundraiser for HIV/AIDS research and a vocal supporter of LGBTQ+ rights. She founded the nonprofit organizations Ray of Light Foundation (1998), which supports equal rights, education, and peace around the world, and Raising Malawi (2006), which helps orphaned and impoverished children in Malawi.
In 2008 Madonna was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Eight years later she was honored as Woman of the Year at the Billboard Women in Music event, during which she gave a powerful speech calling out the sexism, misogyny, and, later, ageism she had faced in her career. In 2023 the U.S. Library of Congress added Like a Virgin to the National Recording Registry, a list of audio recordings deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
