by Rachel Alessi

Created on: June 26, 2010   Last Updated: November 05, 2011

Amy Jade Winehouse was born on 14 September 1983, in the London borough of Enfield. It was clear from a young age that Amy had talent but she also had the attitude! She was expelled from the prestigious Sylvia Young Theatre School for piercing her nose at 14 and went on to study at the Brit performing art school in Croyden before bursting onto the British pop scene in 2003 with her unique, soulful voice and quirky style.  

Her debut album, Frank, released in 2003, was a commercial success and critically acclaimed by the music industry. It was nominated for the highly prestigious Mercury Prize. The follow up, Back to Black, hit the shops on 30 October 2007, and shot Winehouse into the stratosphere. The third biggest seller of the 2000s in the UK, it was nominated for six Grammy Awards, winning five of them and tying the then record for the most wins by a female artist in a single night (the only artist to beat Winehouse is Beyonce, who won six in 2010). It made Amy Winehouse the first British singer to win five Grammys, including Best New Artist, Song of the Year and Record of the Year.

On 14 February 2007 Winehouse won a BRIT Award for Best British Female Artist; she had also been nominated for Best British Album, losing out to the Arctic Monkeys offering, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not. She has also won the internationally acclaimed and respected Ivor Novello Award, the only award in the musical calendar that is not influenced by the record companies, but judged by the writing community itself, a staggering three times!

Unfortunately Amy’s troubled and turbulent private life has sometimes overtaken her glittering music career and she has been a regular in the tabloids for all the wrong reason.  In 2007, photos of Amy and her then husband, Blake Fielder Civil, both bloodied and bruised after a violent bust up in the Sanderson Hotel, London shocked the public. Winehouse went on to spend much of that summer and out of rehab for heroin and crack addiction. She denied that Civil had anything to do with her addictions saying that he had ‘saved her life’.  But it was clear that the couple were seriously out of control, if not to the couple themselves, then certainly to the public at large, as well as the couples’ parents who even went on TV in a heartfelt plea to Blake and Amy to seek the help they so desperately needed. But this plea fell on deaf ears.

As Amy’s career

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