Donna Summer

Date of Birth 31 December 1948, Boston, Massachusetts, USA Donna Summer was the Queen of Disco in the 1970s with a pop/dance/rock sound that was a hybrid of American soul and European synthesizer based music. Summer's musical career was launched on stage in Munich, Germany, in productions of Hair and Porgy & Bess. In Germany, she hooked up with producers, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, and delivered the orgasmic "Love to Love You Baby" which brought her worldwide fame. Summer was the first female artist to garner back-to-back multi-platinum double albums and the first female artist to incorporate synthesizers as well as the first artist to create an extended play song. Musically, she diversified into pop and rock, while career-wise, she appeared in the disco dud, Thank God It's Friday (1978), for which the song, "Last Dance" won a Best Song Oscar, as well as numerous American TV music specials. Her career its zenith in 1980 with the release of the critically-acclaimed record, "The Wanderer", a diverse fusion of rock and dance which is still considered to be the forerunner of such range of artists as Billy Idol, Whitney Houston and Alanis Morissette. But soon after 1980, Summer announced that she was a born-again Christian. She was then accused of making anti-gay comments, which were later proved to be false, which brought a worldwide boycott of her music in dance clubs. Summer returned to the Top of the Pop charts in in the late 80s and early 90s with various dance hits. She recently ended her longtime association with Polygram and moved to Nashville to work on country music and to pursue her other passion, painting. In 1998, she won a Grammy for Best Dance Single and has plans to launch a Broadway musical, Ordinary Girl, based on her life.