What became of The Big time for Sheena Easton?
THE success of TV talent shows such as Britain's Got Talent and The X Factor has made Esther Rantzen feel slightly envious for in 1980 she discovered Sheena Easton and made her a star as the subject of her rags-to-riches documentary The Big Time.
"I genuinely thought about resigning [from the BBC] to be her manager," Esther once said. "I remember saying, 'Ten per cent of her is going to be worth a fortune'. Sadly we never fixed up any sort of percentage in Sheena. That was a major error."
Then a 20-year-old trainee speech and drama teacher Easton later said that without the success of Nine To Five, her first chart-topping hit, she would probably have ended up a housewife. Instead she went on to enjoy huge international chart success but that peaked years ago.
Last week the four-times married singer was seen leaving a clinic in Las Vegas huddled in a hoodie and with a swollen face after an undisclosed medical procedure.
Although she was once said to be worth £40million Easton, 54, now lives in a £120,000 house in a rundown suburb of Las Vegas with the children she adopted as a single mother when they were babies, Jake, 19, and Skylar, 17.
She emigrated to the US in the early 1980s following a world tour in which she performed to standing-room only audiences there, as well as in Europe and the Far East. While becoming a household name in Britain thanks to further hits like the Oscar-nominated theme song to the 1981 James Bond film For Yours Eyes Only she was even more celebrated in the US and Japan.
Through the 1990s she remained one of the highest earning British women despite not having had a chart hit here for years. At one point she was earning more from concerts in Las Vegas than the gambling mecca's favourite Celine Dion.
But more recently Easton's recording career has stalled. She has not released an album since Fabulous in 2000 and property records show that in July this year she sold a five-bedroom home in July to downsize. It is unclear what has happened to her fortune though she did end up in a dispute with one Las Vegas promoter.
It also appears that the kind of drive that took her to the top - not only in her recording career but also in a demanding roster of residential shows in the gambling capital - has made her an exacting person to know.
She was once said to have been given the nickname "Alexis" by colleagues after the overbearing character played by Joan Collins in TV soap Dynasty.
Her four marriages have all been short-lived. According to her fourth husband, American plastic surgeon John Minoli, to whom she was married for just 13 months, her relationships tend to follow a pattern. Speaking for the first time since they split up in 2003 he said: "She struggled with the side effects of being thrust into the limelight so quickly and that has taken its toll.
"There came a point where she always craved solitude and to step off the treadmill. That was what happened with us. We got to a certain point and she suddenly called off the relationship. She was married three times before for about a year at a time. I would have to be a psychoanalyst to understand."
Easton once said: "I don't date a lot. I either get involved and it's over very fast or I get married very fast and then I get to know them. You shouldn't do that. That would be the advice I would give everybody.
Don't marry somebody and then get to know them."
Her first marriage was to singer Sandi Easton when she was 19. It lasted eight months. Her second in 1984 to Rob Light, a talent agent, ended after 18 months. In the summer of 1997, having adopted her children in 1994 and 1996, she met TV producer Tim Delarm and married him within weeks but the marriage foundered after just a year.
Easton had high hopes of her fourth marriage, believing that Minoli would be the man to offer her children a conventional family life but again her hopes were dashed.
She has always denied rumours that she and pop star Prince had a relationship but he was certainly smitten with her. He wrote her a very sexually suggestive R&B single titled Sugar Walls, which some American broadcasters refused to play. They went on to duet on his 1987 hit U Got The Look, which reached No2 in the US charts.
She was also forced to quash rumours of a relationship with Don Johnson, with whom she appeared in Miami Vice in 1987, when their respective characters married.
While all this was welcome exposure for Easton her accent appeared to be affected. An attempted homecoming ended in disaster after she was greeted by boos and thrown bottles when she performed in Glasgow in 1990. Her vowels were described by one commentator as: "Roaming precariously between Bellshill [her Scottish birthplace] and Bel-Air." Shaken by the experience Easton vowed never to return. In 1992 she became a US citizen.
Bellshill was the Scottish town between Glasgow and Edinburgh where Sheena Shirley Orr grew up with her two older brothers, three older sisters and mother Annie. When she was 10 her father Alex, a steel worker, died and Annie took three jobs to support her family.
It was in 1973, when she saw Barbra Streisand in the film The Way We Were, that Easton decided to become a professional singer and "be able to have an effect on others as Barbra had on me". She was studying to be a teacher of speech and drama at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and singing with the band Something Else when she was discovered by Esther Rantzen.
EASTON'S most recent appearance of note was in 2008 at a gay and lesbian festival in Arizona and she topped the bill on a gay cruise around the coast of North America. She has also provided voices for a number of animated movies.
According to her website the first five months of 2014 will see her appear just seven times in the US but it seems she prefers it this way.
She now tries to avoid most of the trappings of celebrity and to enjoy a simple life with her children, who are very much her priority. "I got a life. I realised that I'm working and I have kids. I help them with homework and then I do gigs," she said in a rare interview.
The Big Time it seems is firmly in the past.
source: What became of The Big time for Sheena Easton? | Showbiz | News | Daily Express
..............................................
My dream women when I was 16 years old.. awesome voice, hottest babe on earth, sexy accent. But that was 35 years ago.
Sheena Easton - For Your Eyes Only (HQ) - YouTube
...and just to think I used to have my hair exactly like Don Johnson, hair color too... and all the tail that comes with it..
THE success of TV talent shows such as Britain's Got Talent and The X Factor has made Esther Rantzen feel slightly envious for in 1980 she discovered Sheena Easton and made her a star as the subject of her rags-to-riches documentary The Big Time.
"I genuinely thought about resigning [from the BBC] to be her manager," Esther once said. "I remember saying, 'Ten per cent of her is going to be worth a fortune'. Sadly we never fixed up any sort of percentage in Sheena. That was a major error."
Then a 20-year-old trainee speech and drama teacher Easton later said that without the success of Nine To Five, her first chart-topping hit, she would probably have ended up a housewife. Instead she went on to enjoy huge international chart success but that peaked years ago.
Last week the four-times married singer was seen leaving a clinic in Las Vegas huddled in a hoodie and with a swollen face after an undisclosed medical procedure.
Although she was once said to be worth £40million Easton, 54, now lives in a £120,000 house in a rundown suburb of Las Vegas with the children she adopted as a single mother when they were babies, Jake, 19, and Skylar, 17.
She emigrated to the US in the early 1980s following a world tour in which she performed to standing-room only audiences there, as well as in Europe and the Far East. While becoming a household name in Britain thanks to further hits like the Oscar-nominated theme song to the 1981 James Bond film For Yours Eyes Only she was even more celebrated in the US and Japan.
Through the 1990s she remained one of the highest earning British women despite not having had a chart hit here for years. At one point she was earning more from concerts in Las Vegas than the gambling mecca's favourite Celine Dion.
But more recently Easton's recording career has stalled. She has not released an album since Fabulous in 2000 and property records show that in July this year she sold a five-bedroom home in July to downsize. It is unclear what has happened to her fortune though she did end up in a dispute with one Las Vegas promoter.
It also appears that the kind of drive that took her to the top - not only in her recording career but also in a demanding roster of residential shows in the gambling capital - has made her an exacting person to know.
She was once said to have been given the nickname "Alexis" by colleagues after the overbearing character played by Joan Collins in TV soap Dynasty.
Her four marriages have all been short-lived. According to her fourth husband, American plastic surgeon John Minoli, to whom she was married for just 13 months, her relationships tend to follow a pattern. Speaking for the first time since they split up in 2003 he said: "She struggled with the side effects of being thrust into the limelight so quickly and that has taken its toll.
"There came a point where she always craved solitude and to step off the treadmill. That was what happened with us. We got to a certain point and she suddenly called off the relationship. She was married three times before for about a year at a time. I would have to be a psychoanalyst to understand."
Easton once said: "I don't date a lot. I either get involved and it's over very fast or I get married very fast and then I get to know them. You shouldn't do that. That would be the advice I would give everybody.
Don't marry somebody and then get to know them."
Her first marriage was to singer Sandi Easton when she was 19. It lasted eight months. Her second in 1984 to Rob Light, a talent agent, ended after 18 months. In the summer of 1997, having adopted her children in 1994 and 1996, she met TV producer Tim Delarm and married him within weeks but the marriage foundered after just a year.
Easton had high hopes of her fourth marriage, believing that Minoli would be the man to offer her children a conventional family life but again her hopes were dashed.
She has always denied rumours that she and pop star Prince had a relationship but he was certainly smitten with her. He wrote her a very sexually suggestive R&B single titled Sugar Walls, which some American broadcasters refused to play. They went on to duet on his 1987 hit U Got The Look, which reached No2 in the US charts.
She was also forced to quash rumours of a relationship with Don Johnson, with whom she appeared in Miami Vice in 1987, when their respective characters married.
While all this was welcome exposure for Easton her accent appeared to be affected. An attempted homecoming ended in disaster after she was greeted by boos and thrown bottles when she performed in Glasgow in 1990. Her vowels were described by one commentator as: "Roaming precariously between Bellshill [her Scottish birthplace] and Bel-Air." Shaken by the experience Easton vowed never to return. In 1992 she became a US citizen.
Bellshill was the Scottish town between Glasgow and Edinburgh where Sheena Shirley Orr grew up with her two older brothers, three older sisters and mother Annie. When she was 10 her father Alex, a steel worker, died and Annie took three jobs to support her family.
It was in 1973, when she saw Barbra Streisand in the film The Way We Were, that Easton decided to become a professional singer and "be able to have an effect on others as Barbra had on me". She was studying to be a teacher of speech and drama at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and singing with the band Something Else when she was discovered by Esther Rantzen.
EASTON'S most recent appearance of note was in 2008 at a gay and lesbian festival in Arizona and she topped the bill on a gay cruise around the coast of North America. She has also provided voices for a number of animated movies.
According to her website the first five months of 2014 will see her appear just seven times in the US but it seems she prefers it this way.
She now tries to avoid most of the trappings of celebrity and to enjoy a simple life with her children, who are very much her priority. "I got a life. I realised that I'm working and I have kids. I help them with homework and then I do gigs," she said in a rare interview.
The Big Time it seems is firmly in the past.
source: What became of The Big time for Sheena Easton? | Showbiz | News | Daily Express
..............................................
My dream women when I was 16 years old.. awesome voice, hottest babe on earth, sexy accent. But that was 35 years ago.
Sheena Easton - For Your Eyes Only (HQ) - YouTube
...and just to think I used to have my hair exactly like Don Johnson, hair color too... and all the tail that comes with it..
