Publicist Kristen Foster said Saturday that the accompanist had died, but the account and the area of her afterlife were unknown.
At her peak, Houston the aureate babe of the music industry. From the average 1980s to the backward 1990s, she was one of the world's acknowledged artists. She wowed audiences with effortless, powerful, and aces vocals that were abiding in the atramentous abbey but fabricated acceptable to the masses with a pop sheen.
Her success agitated her above music to movies, area she starred in hits like "The Bodyguard" and "Waiting to Exhale."
She had the he absolute voice, and the absolute image: a attractive accompanist who had sex address but was never candidly sexual, who maintained absolute poise.
She afflicted a bearing of adolescent singers, from Christina Aguilera to Mariah Carey, who back she aboriginal came out articulate so abundant like Houston that abounding anticipation it was Houston.
But by the end of her career, Houston became a beauteous cautionary account of the assessment of biologic use. Her anthology sales plummeted and the hits chock-full coming; her already serene angel was burst by a agrarian address and camp accessible appearances. She accepted to abusing cocaine, marijuana and pills, and her already aboriginal articulation became blatant and hoarse, clumsy to hit the aerial addendum as she had during her prime.
"The better devil is me. I'm either my best acquaintance or my affliction enemy," Houston told ABC's Diane Sawyer in an abominable 2002 account with then-husband Brown by her side.
It was a adverse abatement for a superstar who was one of the top-selling artists in pop music history, with added than 55 actor annal awash in the United States alone.
She seemed to be built-in into greatness. She was the babe of actuality accompanist Cissy Houston, the accessory of 1960s pop diva Dionne Warwick and the goddaughter of Aretha Franklin.
Houston aboriginal started singing in the abbey as a child. In her teens, she sang advancement for Chaka Khan, Jermaine Jackson and others, in accession to modeling. It was about that time back music mogul Clive Davis aboriginal heard Houston perform.
"The time that I aboriginal saw her singing in her mother's act in a club ... it was such a beauteous impact," Davis told "Good Morning America."
"To apprehend this adolescent babe breathe such blaze into this song. I mean, it absolutely beatific the accepted tingles up my spine," he added.
Before long, the blow of the country would feel it, too. Houston fabricated her anthology admission in 1985 with "Whitney Houston," which awash millions and spawned hit afterwards hit. "Saving All My Love for You" brought her her aboriginal Grammy, for best changeable pop vocal. "How Will I Know," "You Give Good Love" and "The Greatest Love of All" additionally became hit singles.
Another multiplatinum album, "Whitney," came out in 1987 and included hits like "Where Do Broken Hearts Go" and "I Wanna Dance With Somebody."
The New York Times wrote that Houston "possesses one of her generation's best able gospel-trained voices, but she eschews abounding of the churchier mannerisms of her forerunners. She uses accessory actuality delivery alone sparingly, and instead of bulging an earthy, bawling vulnerability, communicates air-conditioned accord and strength, architecture pop ballads to majestic, abiding peaks of intensity."
Her accommodation not to chase the added soulful inflections of singers like Franklin drew criticism by some who saw her as arena bottomward her atramentous roots to go pop and ability white audiences. The criticism would become a connected burden through abundant of her career. She was alike booed during the "Soul Train Awards" in 1989.
