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Sheena Easton (born Sheena Shirley Orr in April, 1959
in Bellshill, North Lanarkshire, Scotland) is a Scottish Grammy Award-winning
pop singer and theatre & television actress. Sheena became famous for being the
focus of an episode of the United Kingdom television programme The Big Time, a 1980
reality TV series which recorded her attempts to gain a record contract and got her
a deal with EMI.
Easton was the youngest of six children of a steel mill laborer, Alex Orr, and his
wife Annie. Her siblings included brothers Robert and Alex and sisters Marilyn,
Annessa and Morag. Her earliest known public performance as a singer was at the age
of five, when in 1964 she sang "Early One Morning" for her uncle and aunt and
various relatives at the couple's 25th wedding anniversary celebration.
In 1969, Easton's father died. Her mother took on work as a laborer to support the
family. Easton's web site states that her mother was always available for her
children, despite her tremendous workload: "Sheena always speaks very highly of her
mom and the wonderful job she did in raising her and her siblings, including
teaching each of them all to read at home before they were even enrolled in
school."
She had not seriously considered entering upon a singing career until a viewing of
the movie The Way We Were, with Barbra Streisand. Streisand's singing over the
opening credits "overtook" the young Scottish girl and convinced her that what she
wanted most was to be a singer and to have that kind of effect on others. Her top
grades in school earned her a scholarship to attend the Royal Scottish Academy of
Music and Drama in Glasgow, and she trained there from 1975 to 1979 as a speech and
drama teacher by day, while singing with a band called 'Something Else' by night at
local clubs. She chose to study teaching rather than performing, because it was a
course of study that would let her perfect her craft as a singer.
In 1979, she married Sandi Easton, the first of four husbands. They divorced after
eight months, but Sheena decided to keep the surname Easton. That year, Esther
Rantzen, producer of the BBC programme The Big Time selected Easton as the subject
of a documentary film planned to chronicle a relative unknown's rise to pop-music
stardom, after one of her Academy instructors coaxed her into auditioning. Her
talent persuaded reluctant EMI executives to award her a contract, and Christopher
Neil was assigned as her recording producer. Deke Arlon became her first manager,
and Easton spent much of 1980 being followed by camera crews, who filmed her
throughout the process of making her first EMI single, "Modern Girl."
Her second marriage, in 1984, was to Rob Light, a talent agent, but ended after 18
months. Easton earned U.S. citizenship in 1992 and adopted her first child, Jake in
1994. Two years later, she adopted again, this time a baby girl named Skylar. In
the summer of 1997, she met producer Tim Delarm, while filming an episode of ESPN
Canon Photo Safari in Yellowstone National Park and later married Delarm in Las
Vegas July of 1997. The marriage lasted one year. In 2001, she became engaged to
John Minoli, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and married him on November 9, 2002.
They divorced in 2003 and Easton has been a single mother to her two children since
and currently resides in Las Vegas.
Shrewd investments in Florida property have meant that she has appeared in the
Sunday Times Rich List.
 Career
overview
A screenshot of "9 to 5",her first single, the disco-tinged soft-synth-pop tune
"Modern Girl," was released in the UK before the show aired and reached a
disappointing #56. At the end of the show, Sheena was still unsure of her future as
a singer, but the question was soon resolved when, after the show aired, her second
single, "9 To 5," soared up the UK Singles Chart to #3 in 1980. "Modern Girl"
re-entered the chart subsequently and climbed into the top 10, and Easton, who had
just a few months earlier been a virtual unknown, now found herself with two songs
in the top 10 simultaneously.
9 To 5 was Easton's first single release in the United States, although it was
renamed "Morning Train (Nine To Five)" for its release in the U.S. and Canada to
avoid confusion with Dolly Parton's hit movie title song "9 to 5." "Morning Train"
became Easton's only #1 hit in the U.S. and topped both the Billboard Hot 100 and
Adult Contemporary charts in Billboard magazine. "Modern Girl" was released as the
follow-up and peaked at #18, and before 1981 was over Sheena had a top 10 hit in
both the U.S. and UK with the Academy Award-nominated James Bond movie theme "For
Your Eyes Only." Easton's U.S. success culminated in her winning the Grammy Award
for Best New Artist of 1981.
Sheena Easton in For Your Eyes Only. She is the only artist seen performing the
song in the title sequence in the entire Bond series.Easton's first three U.S.
albums, Sheena Easton, You Could Have Been With Me, and Madness, Money and Music,
were all in the same soft rock/adult contemporary pop vein (although she made a
grab for the dance audience with "Machinery," from the latter album), but by the
end of 1982, with British synthesizer bands taking over the charts on both sides of
the Atlantic, she saw her sales slumping. In 1983 she came back strongly in America
with the album Best Kept Secret and its first single, the synthesized dance-pop
tune "Telefone (Long Distance Love Affair)", which became her fourth top 10 hit
(her third was a duet with Kenny Rogers earlier in the year on Bob Seger's "We've
Got Tonight", which reached #1 on the country chart, and the top 10 on the pop and
AC charts). The follow-up to "Telefone," "Almost Over You," was a #1 AC chart hit
and Top 30 pop hit, and later became a hit on the country charts for Lila McCann in
1998.
In 1984, she began collaborating with Prince and made an Olivia Newton-John-like
transformation into a sexy dance-pop siren. She was rewarded with the
biggest-selling U.S. album of her career, A Private Heaven, and her fifth top 10
single, the sassy "Strut." She was also one of the first artists to have a music
video banned because of its lyrics rather than its imagery, when some broadcasters
refused to play the sexually risqué "Sugar Walls", which had been written for her
by Prince (using the pseudonym Alexander Nevermind). "Sugar Walls" was also named
by Tipper Gore of the Parents' Music Resource Council as one of the "Filthy
Fifteen", a list of songs deemed indecent because of their lyrics, alongside
Prince's own "Darling Nikki". "Sugar Walls" also hit #3 on the R&B singles
chart.
Around this time she also recorded a Grammy-winning Spanish-language single, "Me
Gustas Tal Como Eres" ("I Love You Just the Way You Are"), a duet with Luis Miguel.
It was taken from Easton's album, Todo Me Recuerda a Ti ("Everything Reminds Me of
You"). Success in the pop, adult contemporary, R&B, country and Latin fields
earned Easton a reputation as one of the most versatile vocalists of the 1980s.
Easton's follow-up to A Private Heaven, entitled Do You, received poor reviews and
disappointing sales (despite yielding the top 30 single "Do It For Love"). Release
of a further follow-up album, 1987's No Sound But a Heart, was canceled in the
United States after an initial single release, Eternity, flopped. One track from
the album, "The Last to Know," was later covered by Celine Dion for her
English-language debut album, Unison. No Sound But a Heart did eventually get
released in the United States in 1999, with four bonus tracks, including Easton's
contributions to the soundtrack of the 1986 film About Last Night..., "Natural
Love" and the minor hit single "So Far, So Good."
Easton was not totally absent from the charts in 1987, however; She sang on
Prince's #2 hit, U Got the Look, and also appeared in the video. (The two would
later team again for "The Arms of Orion," featured on Prince's soundtrack to the
movie Batman, but it wasn't as big a hit, reaching #36.)
In November 1987 Easton made her first dramatic acting appearance on the television
program Miami Vice, playing a singer named Caitlin Davies, whom Sonny Crockett was
assigned to protect until she made a court appearance. Sonny and Caitlin were
married by the end of the episode, the first of five for Easton until her character
was killed off. By the spring of 1988 the latest installment of the Miami Vice
soundtrack was released, and featured the song "Follow My Rainbow", which Easton
sang on her last appearance, moments before her character was shot to death. The
song also appeared on her next album The Lover In Me, a gold-selling disc released
the following autumn that put Easton back on the charts. This album features Urban
contemporary and Dance-pop. The title song from "The Lover In Me" reached #2 on the
Billboard Hot 100 and became her biggest pop hit since "Morning Train." It also
became a #5 hit on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Singles and Tracks chart. It was
followed on the R&B chart by "Days Like This" (#35), which missed the Billboard
Hot 100.
The
1990s
In 1991, What Comes Naturally became the last of Easton's albums to chart in the
United States; the title song was also her last Top 40 single to date, reaching
#19, and some of her recent albums have only been available in the Far East or
Europe (except for the critically acclaimed No Strings and My Cherie. Sheena
retained a record contract with MCA Japan and released ("Freedom") in 1997 and
("Home") in 1999.
Recent
Times
She signed a record contract with Universal International in 2000 and attempted a
comeback in 2001 with "Fabulous", an album of classic disco covers. Although seen
by many as a blatant attempt to tap into the lucrative gay market, the album was
largely ignored.
On an appearance on Late Night with Bob Costas she confessed her wish to be
pregnant with news anchor Peter Jennings' baby. Jennings recounted the incident in
an interview with Larry King and said he was flattered and amused by the
proposal.
Easton continued acting in America, starring in Broadway revivals of Man Of La
Mancha (1992) and Grease (1996). Between 1994 and 1996, she played several
characters in Gargoyles the animated series, including Lady Finella, the Banshee,
Molly and Robyn Canmore. In 1999, she voice-acted a half-demon character,
Annah-of-the-Shadows, in the computer game Planescape: Torment. She lives in Las
Vegas with her two children and often performs in the city's casinos. She voiced
the character Fiona Canmore for a scripted, but unfinished episode of the canceled
Team Atlantis.
In June 1998, her former secondary school Bellshill Academy celebrated its
centenary. Easton signed a tribute to the school for its special occasion which is
still on display in the main building. She was a pupil there from 1971-1977.
A popular story at the school was that there used to be a school desk that Easton
had graffiti'd her then name "Sheena Orr" which was of some source of pride to the
teacher whose classroom it belonged to. Upon returning from the summer holiday
break a number of years later, the teacher was dismayed to find that the furniture
had all been replaced and the signature strewn desk had gone.
In April and May 2004, Easton visited Australia and featured in a kooky TV
commercial for Connex in Melbourne. A number of unrealistically happy passengers in
an unrealistically underpatronised morning train were singing "9 to 5". Easton
boarded the train at Burnley Station, and screamed. The passengers paused in awe,
then went on singing.
On October 31, 2004, she was inducted into the Casino Legends Hall of Fame at the
Tropicana Resort & Casino along with fellow Las Vegas icons Debbie Reynolds,
Ben Vereen, Patti Page, Jack Jones and Tempest Storm.
In January 2005, Easton appeared in the television series Young Blades.
In July 2005, she played the Narrator in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor
Dreamcoat at North Carolina Theatre in Raleigh, NC. The show co-starred Ray Walker
as Joseph, Merwin Foard as the Pharaoh, David F.M. Vaughn as Reuben, Demond Green
as Judah, and Darryl Winslow as Simeon.
Source : Some of the information on
this page came from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU
Documentation License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Sheena
Easton - Projector - Biography
