Lost her mother at 5, moved to New York with Rs 700, was assaulted at knife-point, and became the biggest popstar of her generation

Madonna on The David Letterman Show. (YouTube; The David Letterman Show)

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The artiste maintained her commendable grades throughout secondary and high school and started training in ballet too. Dance went from being a hobby to passion really quickly, and Madonna received a dance scholarship to the University of Michigan. However, the Wolverines couldn’t keep the artist all to themselves, and she decided to drop out and chase her dream of becoming a full-time dancer.

During an interview with music critic Molly Meldrum, Madonna recalled dropping out and said, “I came to New York to dance professionally for a company. I did that for a while, but I got tired of it. I wanted to sing as well because everyone who heard me sing would say, ‘Oh, you have such a great voice.’ So I went to an audition for a backup singer, and the record producer saw me and told me that I was too good to be behind any other artist and that I should come to Paris with him. So I went with him, and that is how the whole music thing began. I mean, nothing happened in Paris, because that was just too good to be true, but I had a lot of love affairs; that’s about it. I came to New York after 6 months and asked some guys in a band to teach me the guitar. That’s how it all started for me.”

Madonna while accepting the Billboard Woman Of The Year Award. (Photo: YouTube/Billboard)

Her experience of New York wasn’t all too great, though, and during her acceptance speech for Billboard’s Women Of The Year Award in 2016, she recalled that time and said, “When I first moved to New York, I was a teenager. It was 1979, and the city was a very dangerous place to be in. I was held up at gunpoint and sexually assaulted while a knife was digging into my back. My apartment was broken into so many times that I stopped locking the door.” Through all this Madonna kept fighting, and she worked her way through several bands and abandoned synagogues to record her first demo tape and ultimately record her debut single, ‘Everybody’. Her very first few singles made their way into several playlists, including some by Billboard magazine. Soon she would release her debut album named after her, and all hell broke loose, as the world watched this young girl take over the ears and minds of the entire generation one night club at a time.

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Madonna rose to even greater heights in her career with albums such as ‘Like A Virgin’, ‘True Blue’, ‘Like A Prayer’, and ‘Erotica’. Madonna has 14 studio albums to her name, which is an incredibly difficult number to reach, and what is more impressive is that she has stayed relevant for more than 40 years now. Her last album, Madame X, was released in 2019, and she was the first female performer to accumulate $1 billion from her concerts.