Sheena Eestont
Summary: Easton was the youngest of six children of a steel mill laborer, Alex Orr, and his wife Annie. Her siblings included brothers Robert and Alex and sisters Marilyn, Annessa and Morag. Her earliest known public performance as a singer was at the age of five, when in 1964.
BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS
Full Name: Sheena Shirley Orr
Description: Vocalist, Actress, Scotland
Known For: known for the hit “Morning Train” – 1995
Instruments: Voice
Music Styles: Easy listening
Location: United Kingdom
Date Born: 27th April 1959
Location Born: Bellshill, United Kingdom
Sheena Easton – The Official Website
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BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE
Sheena Easton
A Scottish pop singer and theatre and television actress.
Easton became famous for being the focus of an episode in the British television programme The Big Time, which recorded her attempts to gain a record contract and her eventual signing with EMI Records. In the US Easton is a two-time Grammy Award winner and achieved 6 Gold albums and 1 Platinum and has sold over 4 million albums in the US alone, and over 20 million records worldwide. She has recorded 16 studio albums, released 45 singles, and has 15 Top 40 hits on the US Billboard Hot 100. Sheena Easton is the only artist in the history of the US Billboard charts to have a top 3 hit on each of the Billboards key charts: Adult Contemporary, Dance, Pop, Country, and R&B. In the UK, Sheena has 3 top 40 albums and 8 top 40 singles to date.
Easton rose to fame in the early 1980s with the pop hits “9 to 5” (known as “Morning Train” in the United States), “For Your Eyes Only”, “Strut”, “Sugar Walls”, “U Got the Look” with Prince, and “The Lover in Me”. She went on to become successful in the United States and Japan, working with prominent vocalists and producers, such as Prince, Christopher Neil, Kenny Rogers, Luis Miguel, L.A. Reid and Babyface, Patrice Rushen, and Nile Rodgers.
Easton was born Sheena Shirley Orr in the Scottish town of Bellshill, the youngest of six children to steel mill labourer Alex Orr and his wife Annie. She had two brothers (Robert and Alex) and three sisters (Marilyn, Annessa and Morag). Her earliest known public performance as a singer was at the age of five (in 1964), when she sang “Early One Morning” for her uncle and aunt and various relatives at the couple’s 25th wedding anniversary celebration.
Easton’s father died in 1969 and her mother had to support the family. Easton’s website states that despite her mother’s heavy workload she was always available for her children: “Sheena always speaks very highly of her mum and the wonderful job she did in bringing up her and her siblings, including teaching each of them all to read at home before they were even enrolled in school.”
Easton did not consider a singing career until viewing the movie The Way We Were, with Barbra Streisand. Streisand’s singing over the opening credits “overtook” the young girl and convinced her that what she wanted most was to be a singer and to have the same effect on others.
Her top grades in school earned her a scholarship to attend the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, where she trained from 1975 to 1979 as a speech and drama teacher by day, while singing with a band called “Something Else” by night at local clubs.[citation needed] She chose to study teaching rather than performing, because it was a course of study that would let her perfect her craft as a singer.
In 1979, she married Sandi Easton, the first of her four husbands. They divorced after eight months, and Sheena decided to keep the surname Easton. That year, one of her Academy tutors coaxed her into auditioning for Esther Rantzen, producer of the BBC programme The Big Time. Rantzen was planning a documentary film to chronicle a relative unknown’s rise to pop-music stardom. Easton was selected as the subject for the programme, where she met Lulu (another Scottish singer), who told her that she was unlikely to make the “big time”.
Within a year of the programme airing, Sheena Easton proved Lulu wrong as EMI executives awarded her a contract, and Christopher Neil was assigned as her recording producer. Deke Arlon became her first manager, and Easton spent much of 1980 being followed by camera crews, who filmed her throughout the process of making her first EMI single, “Modern Girl”.
Her first single, the disco-tinged soft-synth-pop tune, “Modern Girl”, was released in the UK before the show aired and reached #56. At the end of the show, Easton was still unsure of her future as a singer. The question was soon resolved when, after the show aired, her second single, “9 to 5”, reached #3 on the UK Singles Chart in 1980.
“Modern Girl” re-entered the chart subsequently and climbed into the top 10, and Easton found herself with two songs in the top 10 simultaneously. During the year 1980, Sheena was voted “Best British Female Singer” by the Daily Mirror Pop & Rock Awards, “Best Newcomer” by Capital Radio, and “Best Female Singer” by the TV Times Readers Awards.
“9 to 5” was Easton’s first single release in the United States, although it was renamed “Morning Train (Nine To Five)” for its release in the US and Canada to avoid confusion with Dolly Parton’s hit movie title song “9 to 5”. “Morning Train” became Easton’s first and only #1 hit in the US and topped both the Billboard Hot 100 and Adult Contemporary charts in Billboard magazine. “Modern Girl” was released as the follow-up and peaked at #18, and before 1981 was over Sheena had a Top 10 hit in both the US and UK with the Academy Award-nominated James Bond movie theme ”For Your Eyes Only”. The song was nominated for an Academy Award in 1981 in the category “Best Music (Original Song)”.
Easton’s US success culminated in her winning the Grammy Award for “Best New Artist” of 1981.
Easton’s first three US albums, Sheena Easton (1981) (retitled edition of Take My Time), You Could Have Been With Me (1981), and Madness, Money and Music(1982), were all in the same Soft Rock/Adult Contemporary pop vein (although she made a grab for the New Wave audience with “Machinery”, from the latter album).The title track from You Could Have Been With Me made it in to the Top 15 (US), however, by the end of 1982, she saw her sales slumping.
Some of her songs on these albums were covered by other artists too: “For Your Eyes Only” was covered by Marilyn McCoo and “Prisoner” was covered by the bands Sue Saad and the Next and Uriah Heep.
2003–present: Work in television, live performance, break from recording
In 2003, Easton contributed vocals to “If You’re Happy”, a cover for a Japanese disc called Cover Morning Musume-Hello Project. She also began to host Vegas Live, a talk show with Clint Holmes (later replaced by Brian McKnight).
On 31 October 2004, she was inducted into the Casino Legends Hall of Fame at the Tropicana Resort & Casino along with fellow Las Vegas icons Debbie Reynolds, Ben Vereen, Patti Page, Jack Jones and Tempest Storm.
In January 2005, Easton appeared in the television series Young Blades.
In July 2005, she performed as the Narrator in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at North Carolina Theatre in Raleigh, NC. The show co-starred Ray Walker as Joseph, Merwin Foard as the Pharaoh, David F.M. Vaughn as Reuben, Demond Green as Judah, and Darryl Winslow as Simeon.
Easton worked with composer Nobuo Uematsu for two songs on the video game Lost Odyssey, released for the Xbox 360 video game system in February 2008.
In 2008 and 2009, Easton performed Perry the Teenage Girl, When Will He Call Me?, and Happy Evil Love Song for the Disney Channel animated series Phineas and Ferb.
Easton appeared in a celebration with Kenny Rogers at the MGM Grand at Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut on 10 April 2010.[citation needed] The show was in honor of his 50-year music career. This special is set debut on 8 March 2011 on Great American Country.
Personal life
Easton has been married four times. The first was when she was in Scotland to Sandi Easton at the age of 19. The marriage lasted eight months. Sandi Easton died in 1998, aged 48.
Her second marriage in 1984 to Rob Light, a talent agent, ended after 18 months. Easton was granted US citizenship in 1992 and adopted her first child, Jake Rion Cousins Easton, in 1994.
Two years later, she adopted again, this time a baby girl named Skylar. In the summer of 1997, she met producer Tim Delarm while filming an episode of ESPN Canon Photo Safari in Yellowstone National Park and later married Delarm in Las Vegas in July 1997.
The marriage lasted one year. On 9 November 2002 she married John Minoli, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon.They divorced in 2003.
Easton is a single mother to her two children, and currently resides in Henderson, Nevada. She reportedly made shrewd investments in Florida property, that led to her appearance on the Sunday Times Rich List, but she denies such claims.
Discography
Take My Time (1980)
Sheena Easton (1981) retitled edition of Take My Time
You Could Have Been with Me (1981)
Madness, Money & Music (1982)
Best Kept Secret (1983)
A Private Heaven (1984)
Todo Me Recuerda a Ti (1984) – Spanish language release
Do You (1985)
No Sound But a Heart (1987)
The Lover in Me (1988)
What Comes Naturally (1991)
No Strings (1993)
My Cherie (1995)
Freedom (1997)
Home (1999)
Fabulous (2000)
Filmography
For Your Eyes Only (1981) – Herself in opening credit sequence
Miami Vice (1987) – Caitlin Davies (five episodes)
All Dogs Go to Heaven 2 (1996), All Dogs Go to Heaven: The Series (1996 – TV series), An All Dogs Christmas Carol (1998) – voice of Sasha LeFleur
Body Bags (1993) – Megan (in segment titled “Hair”)
Highlander: The Series (1993) – Annie Devlin (in episode titled “An Eye for an Eye”)
The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (1993) – Crystal Hawks (one episode)
Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1993) – voice of Agnes
TekWar (TV series) (1994) – War Bride
Real Ghosts a.k.a Haunted Lives: True Ghost Stories (1995) – Janet (nightclub owner)
Gargoyles (1995) – Robyn Canmore, Banshee, Molly, Finella
The Outer Limits (1996) – Melissa McCammon in episode titled “Falling Star”
Road Rovers (1996) – Groomer, Persia, Mrs. British Prime Minister
Duckman (1997) – Betty (one episode)
Chicken Soup for the Soul (1999) – Vicky in episode titled “Sand Castles”
Disney’s The Legend of Tarzan (2001) – voice of Dr. Robin Doyle (two episodes)
Vegas Live! With Clint Holmes and Sheena Easton (2003)
Scooby-Doo and the Loch Ness Monster (2004) – voice of Professor Fiona Pembrooke
Young Blades (2005) – Queen Anne
Broadway
Man of La Mancha – Aldonza (1991-1992-reprise role in 1998) (Broadway show)
Grease (1996) – Betty Rizzo (Broadway show)