Whitney Houston, 1963–2012

When she burst onto the pop scene in the 1980s, Whitney Houston seemed destined for lifelong stardom. She had a perfect figure, a dazzling smile, and a natural affinity for the camera—all essential qualities for the MTV era. And she had a voice to match her looks: a magnificent gospel-schooled instrument that combined power and purity in equal measures. But after conquering the music world, the wholesome pop princess took a dark turn. In the mid 1990s, she slipped deeper into drug addiction, and the hit songs dried up as her once pitch-perfect voice grew raspy and thin. Last week, she was found dead in a Los Angeles hotel room. “The biggest devil is me,” she said in 2002. “I’m either my best friend or my worst enemy.”

“Music was in Houston’s DNA,” said the London Independent. She was the daughter of John Houston, an entertainment manager from Newark, N.J., and Cissy Houston, a gospel singer. Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick were her cousins, and the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, was her godmother. By high school, she was singing backup for stars like Chaka Khan and Lou Rawls, and had also embarked on a modeling career that put her in Glamour and Seventeen magazines.

Houston’s big break came in 1982, when she was spotted at a Manhattan supper club by Clive Davis, the music mogul who had guided the early careers of Bruce Springsteen and Barry Manilow. “Davis saw in Houston a rare bundle of raw talent, beauty, and pedigree,” said the Los Angeles Times. He spent two years and $250,000 preparing her debut album, 1985’s Whitney Houston. It was a sound investment: The LP sold 24 million copies, and its follow-up, 1987’s Whitney, became the first album by a woman to enter the Billboard charts at No. 1. In 1992, she added acting to her repertoire, starring alongside Kevin Costner in the box-office hit The Bodyguard. “The movie’s octave-stretching version of Dolly Parton’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ became another of Houston’s calling cards,” said The Washington Post, and the soundtrack sold 17 million copies in the U.S.

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That same year, Houston married singer and rapper Bobby Brown. Their tempestuous relationship quickly turned toxic, as both Brown and Houston descended into heavy use of marijuana, alcohol, cocaine, and crack. Brown was also physically and emotionally abusive. “He spit on me, in my face,” Houston said. They divorced in 2007, but her decline continued. She sometimes appeared disheveled and incoherent in public, and was booed at several performances when she could no longer sing her signature hits. She went in and out of rehab. Like Michael Jackson, Houston became a punch line for comedians.

Her most recent album, 2009’s I Look to You, sold more than a million copies but produced no big hits. It felt like an attempt to “reclaim her glory,” said the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, but “the most important element of her star power, that remarkable voice, darkened and frayed.” Houston was for many years a model for female pop stars, said the Newark Star-Ledger; she was “post-ethnic and relentlessly positive, with a voice larger than life.” By the time of her death, however, she had become “a stunning cautionary tale of the toll of drug use.”