The talented Natalie Cole is a famous musician, singer, and songwriter who is known as the daughter of the late, great Nat King Cole as well as for her huge contributions to the music industry in her singing and songwriting successes (she released almost twenty-five albums), including her winning many Grammy Awards for her work.
Born as Stephanie Natalie Maria Cole on February 6, 1950, Cole was raised in one of the most wealthy parts of L.A. She grew up with an appreciation and talent for jazz, blues, and soul music, and started performing when she was just eleven. Four years later, in 1965, her famous father died of cancer.
Cole began snagging Grammy Awards as soon as she hit the music scene professionally in the mid-1970s. Her debut album, Inseparable, was released in 1975. A year later she won two Grammys: one for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance for "This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)"—a category normally dominated by "Queen of Soul" Aretha Franklin—and one for Best New Artist.
Cole’s success with many hit albums and singles continued through the end of the 70s and into the 80s, until she hit a snag for several years in order to deal with a major drug problem that had included abuse of LSD, heroin, and crack cocaine, the inability to properly handle her music business and her family life, and an arrest for possession of heroin back in 1975. Her full drug story is told in her autobiography Angel on my Shoulder released in 2000, which was turned into a made-for-TV movie on NBC later that year.
The singer ended up in rehab in 1983, and by 1985 she was in good health, and ready for a comeback. She released the albums Dangerous in 1985 and Everlasting in 1987, the latter of which sold more than two million copies in the U.S. and garnered her a Soul Train Award for Female Singer of the Year for the single "I Live for Your Love." Everlasting also included a remake of Bruce Springsteen’s "Pink Cadillac."
However, likely her best-known and most successful album to date is 1991’s Unforgettable…with Love, which features her own renditions of her late father Nat King Cole’s greatest hits. It sold more than five million copies in the U.S., and earned her a number of Grammy Awards.
Since then, Cole has continued to release albums, some of them featuring pop, R&B, rock, and soul, although she most mostly stayed true to her original "smooth jazz" sound. Her most recent release is Leavin’ (September 2006), which features cover tracks of Sting, Fiona Apple, Kate Bush, and Shelby Lynne.
Besides her singing success, Cole has enjoyed somewhat of a side career in acting, having appeared in life concerts, musical programs, television specials, and TV series since the 1980s. More recently she has appeared in I’ll Fly Away, Touched by an Angel, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which stars Matthew Perry and Amanda Peet.
She made a notable guest-starring appearance in the hit medical Grey’s Anatomy in 2006, in which she played a terminally ill patient needing a fork removed from her neck. Grey's Anatomy stars Ellen Pompeo, Patrick Dempsey, Sandra Oh, Justin Chambers, Katherine Heigl, and Isaiah Washington, among others.
She has also appeared on film, particularly in the Cole Porter biopic De-Lovely, starring Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd.
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