This is Amy Winehouse’s biography published in part by People.com
1983
– September 14
Amy Winehouse has Arrived
Cab driver Mitch Winehouse and his pharmacist wife Janis welcome their second child Amy into their North London home. When the Winehouses split, a nine-year-old Amy and her older brother Alex live mostly with their mother in Southgate – a London suburb best known for housing the Priory, a celebrity-friendly rehab hospital. “She was always very self-willed,” her father Mitch tells Rolling Stone in 2007. “Not badly behaved but… different.”
1996
Too Cool for School
At 12, Winehouse wins a space in the prestigious Sylvia Young Theatre School, but is expelled long before graduation. (The final straw? Getting her nose pierced). “She was very bright but she was always messing around,” mom Janis tells London’s Daily Mail in 2007. By 16, Winehouse – who later tells Interview, “I’m not very ambitious at all” – lands a deal with Simon Fuller’s (the man behind American Idol) management company. She eventually signs with Island Records
2003
– January
The Amy-Blake Rollercoaster
Winehouse meets Blake Fielder-Civil, a part-time gofer on music video sets, at a local bar. She promptly has his name tattooed above her heart, and the two begin a tempestuous, on-and-off romance. During one particularly prolonged hiatus, he reconciles with an old flame and a heart-broken Winehouse writes the bulk of her 2007 breakthrough album, Back to Black. It was a time of extreme creativity, but Winehouse admits she was also attempting to drown her sorrows in booze.
October 20
Amy Releases Frank
Frank, a jazz-inflected album that explores the pain of a previous breakup, goes platinum in the U.K. While the single, “Stronger Than Me,” wins Winehouse the Ivor Novello songwriting award for Best Contemporary Song, she seems dissatisfied with the album’s slick packaging and arrangements. “I can’t even listen to Frank any more,” she tells The Sun in 2006. “In fact, I’ve never been able to.”
2006
– Fall
Smaller Amy, Bigger Beehive
The British press buzzes about Winehouse’s rapid weight loss – The Times, for example, claims the once-curvy chanteuse dropped three dress sizes. Winehouse attributes her shockingly slim new look to cutting back on her marijuana use. “I’m a musician; I’m not a model,” she says on her 2007 concert DVD, I Told YouI Was Trouble. “The more insecure I felt, the more I’d drink.” And the more she’d tease that trademark beehive: “The more insecure I feel, the bigger my hair has to be.”
October 30
Winehouse is Ba-ack
Back to Black is released in the U.K. and is propelled by the catchy “Rehab.” The song recounts the time Fuller’s company tried to force her into a treatment facility. “I did [go to rehab], for just 15 minutes,” she tells The Sun. “I went in and said, ‘Hello’ and explained that I drink because I’m in love and have f—ed up the relationship. Then I walked out.”
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