Mariah Carey (born March 27, 1970) is an American R&B and pop singer-songwriter, record producer and occasional actress. She made her debut in 1990 under the guidance of Columbia Records executive Tommy Mottola, and became both the most successful and best-selling artist for that decade, according to Billboard magazine and the World Music Awards.
After marrying Mottola in 1993, albums such as Music Box (1993) and Daydream (1995) consolidated her position as one of Columbia's most successful acts. Carey separated from Mottola in 1997, and her proceeding albums presented her in an attempt to distance herself from the career trajectory that he had plotted for her; they presented a more overtly sexual and hip hop-oriented sound and image. In 2001, issues between Carey and her label executives led her to part ways with them, and she signed a lucrative deal with Virgin Records shortly after. However, she was dropped the following year after a highly publicised physical breakdown and the notoriously poor reception of Glitter, her film and soundtrack project. After signing to Island Def Jam Records in 2002, she returned to the forefront of popular music in 2005 with the success of her ninth studio album The Emancipation of Mimi.
Since her debut, Carey has scored seventeen number-one singles on the U.S Billboard charts, tying the record with Elvis Presley for the most U.S. number-one hits by a solo artist. In 2003, she was declared as "the most successful" and "number-one selling female artist in the history of recorded music" by the IFPI. She is also well-known for her five- octave vocal range, where the use of the whistle register and melisma are central features of her singing style. In 2003 she was voted as having the "the greatest voice in music" by MTV.
Carey was born in Huntington, New York. She is the third and youngest child of Patricia Hickey, a former opera singer and voice coach of Irish American Roman Catholic extraction, and Alfred Roy Carey (né Núñez), an aeronautical engineer of mixed African American and Hispanic- Venezuelan descent. She was named after the song "They Call the Wind Maria", from the musical Paint Your Wagon. Carey's older brother Morgan suffered from epilepsy, while her older sister Alison developed a drug addiction and was arrested for prostitution in 2005. As a multiracial family, the Carey household was met with racial slurs, hostility, and sometimes violence, causing the family to move frequently around the New York area. The strain on the family led to the divorce of Carey's parents when she was three years old. Carey had little contact with her father, and her mother worked several jobs to support the family.
