Cyndi Lauper
Cynthia Ann Stephanie Lauper is an American singer, songwriter and actress. Known for her distinctive image, featuring a variety of hair colors and eccentric clothing, and for her powerful four-octave vocal range, Lauper has sold over 50 million records worldwide. She has also been celebrated for her humanitarian work, particularly as an advocate for LGBTQ rights in the United States.
Lauper's debut album, She's So Unusual, was the first debut album by a female artist to achieve four top-five hits on the Billboard Hot 100—"Girls Just Want to Have Fun", "Time After Time", "She Bop", and "All Through the Night"—and earned Best New Artist at the 27th Annual Grammy Awards in 1985. The music video for "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" won Best Female Video at the inaugural 1984 MTV Video Music Awards and has been recognized by MTV, VH1 and Rolling Stone as one of the greatest videos of the era. Lauper's second album, True Colors, achieved two more top-five hits; the title track and "Change of Heart". Lauper's chart success continued with the singles "The Goonies 'R' Good Enough", "I Drove All Night" and into the 2000s with multiple number-one hits on the Hot Dance Club Play charts, "Same Ol' Story", and "Into the Nightlife".
Since 1983, Lauper has released twelve studio albums and participated in many other projects. In 2010, Memphis Blues became Billboard most successful blues album of the year, remaining at number one on the Billboard Blues Albums chart for 13 consecutive weeks. In 2013, Lauper won the Tony Award for Best Original Score for composing the Broadway musical Kinky Boots, making her the first woman to win the category by herself. The musical was awarded five other Tonys, including Best Musical. In 2014, Lauper was awarded the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album for the cast recording. In 2016, the West End production won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical.
Lauper's accolades include two Grammy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, a Tony Award, three MTV Video Music Awards, four Billboard Music Awards, two American Music Awards and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She is one of the few singers to win three of the four major American entertainment awards. In 2015, she was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Lauper was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in November 2025. She's So Unusual ranked among Rolling Stone list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. VH1 named "Time After Time" one of the best songs of the preceding 25 years, and named Lauper the 58th-greatest woman in rock and roll.
Life and career
1953–1979: Early life
Lauper was born in Brooklyn, New York City, to a Catholic family. Her father, Fred, was of Swiss-German descent, and a descendant of Christen Lauper, a leader of the Swiss peasant war of 1653. Her mother, Catrine, was of Italian descent. Lauper's siblings are her younger brother Fred, and older sister Ellen. Lauper's parents divorced when she was five. Her mother remarried and divorced again.Lauper grew up in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens and, as a child, listened to such artists as the Beatles and Judy Garland. At age 12, she began writing songs and playing an acoustic guitar given to her by her sister.
Lauper expressed herself with a variety of hair colors and eccentric clothing, and took a friend's advice to spell her name as "Cyndi" rather than "Cindy". Her unconventional sense of style led to classmates bullying and throwing stones at her.
Lauper went to Richmond Hill High School, but was expelled although she later earned her General Educational Development. She ran away from home at 17 to escape her abusive stepfather, intending to study art. Her journey took her to Canada, where she spent two weeks in the woods with her dog Sparkle, trying to find herself. She eventually traveled to Vermont, where she took art classes at Johnson State College and supported herself working odd jobs. In 2019, Lauper gave the commencement address at Northern Vermont University – Johnson, the academic institution that includes Johnson State. At this event, NVU bestowed upon her an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters.
1980–1982: Blue Angel
In 1978, Lauper met saxophonist John Turi through her manager Ted Rosenblatt. Turi and Lauper formed a band named Blue Angel and recorded a demo tape of original music. Steve Massarsky, manager of the Allman Brothers Band, heard the tape and liked Lauper's voice. He bought Blue Angel's contract for $5,000 and became their manager.Lauper received recording offers as a solo artist, but held out, wanting the band to be included in any deal she made. Blue Angel was eventually signed by Polydor Records and they released their debut and sole studio album Blue Angel on the label in 1980. Lauper hated the album cover, saying that it made her look like Big Bird, but Rolling Stone magazine later included it as one of the 100 best new wave album covers. Despite critical acclaim, the album sold poorly and the band broke up. The members of Blue Angel had a falling-out with Massarsky and fired him as their manager. He later filed an $80,000 suit against them, which forced Lauper into bankruptcy. After this Lauper temporarily lost her voice due to an inverted cyst in her vocal cord.
After Blue Angel broke up, Lauper spent time, due to her financial problems, working in retail stores, waitressing at IHOP, and singing in local clubs. Her most frequent gigs were at El Sombrero. Music critics who saw Lauper perform with Blue Angel believed she had star potential due to her four-octave singing range. In 1981, while singing in a local New York bar, Lauper met David Wolff, who took over as her manager and had her sign a recording contract with Portrait Records, a subsidiary of Epic Records.
1983–1985: ''She's So Unusual''
On October 14, 1983, Lauper released her debut solo studio album, She's So Unusual. The album became a worldwide hit, peaking at No. 4 in the U.S. and reaching the top five in eight other countries. The primary studio musicians were Eric Bazilian and Rob Hyman, Rick Chertoff, Richard Termini and Peter Wood. Lauper became popular with teenagers and critics alike, in part due to her hybrid punk image, which was crafted by stylist Patrick Lucas.Lauper co-wrote four songs on She's So Unusual, including the hits "Time After Time" and "She Bop". On the songs she did not write, Lauper sometimes changed the lyrics; for instance, Lauper found the original lyrics to "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" to be misogynistic, so she rewrote the song as an anthem for young women.
The album includes five cover songs, including the Brains' new wave track "Money Changes Everything" and Prince's "When You Were Mine". The album made Lauper the first female artist to have four consecutive Billboard Hot 100 top five hits from one album. The album stayed in the Top 200 charts for more than 65 weeks, and since has sold 16 million copies worldwide.
Lauper won Best New Artist at the 27th Annual Grammy Awards. She's So Unusual also received nominations for Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, and Song of the Year. She wore almost a pound of necklaces at her award ceremony. It also won the Grammy for Best Album Package, which went to the art director, Janet Perr.
The music video for "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" won the inaugural award for Best Female Video at the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards, and made Lauper an MTV staple. The video featured professional wrestling manager "Captain" Lou Albano as Lauper's father, and her real-life mother, Catrine, as her mother, and also featured her attorney, her manager, her brother Butch, and her dog Sparkle. In 1984–85, Lauper appeared on the covers of the magazines Rolling Stone, Time, and Newsweek. She appeared twice on the cover of People, and was named a Ms. magazine Woman of the Year in 1985.
In 1985, Lauper participated in USA for Africa's famine-relief fund-raising single "We Are the World", which sold more than 20 million copies since then.
Lauper appeared with professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, who was cast as her "bodyguard" and would also later make many appearances as herself in a number of the World Wrestling Federation's "Rock 'n' Wrestling Connection" events, and after making her debut in the World Wrestling Federation in June 1984, became Wendi Richter's manager. Half a year after Captain Lou Albano appeared in the "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" music video, an angle developed where Lauper feuded with the sexist Albano, and managed Richter when she defeated Albano's choice The Fabulous Moolah for the WWF Women's Championship at The Brawl to End It All, which was broadcast live on MTV on July 23, 1984. By the end of 1984, the storyline feud between Lauper and Albano was dropped when Albano turned face, with Albano even becoming more friendly towards Lauper. In spite of this, Lauper still continued to make some appearances at WWF shows as Richter's manager during Richter's 1984-1985 WWF run, including at the inaugural WrestleMania event. Dave Wolff, Lauper's boyfriend and manager at the time, was a wrestling fan as a boy, and engineered the rock and wrestling connection. Salt Lake City radio station 92.5 The Beat has described Lauper, who was instrumental in the WWF's early ties to MTV, as having helped put the WWF "on the Map" and for having "a key role in launching WWF into the mainstream."
In May 1985, Lauper released the single "The Goonies 'R' Good Enough," from the soundtrack to the film The Goonies, and an accompanying music video which featured several wrestling stars, Steven Spielberg, the majority of The Goonies cast, and the then relatively unknown Bangles. The song peaked at number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
However, Wendi Richter, and with her Lauper, would cease making more frequent appearances in the WWF when Richter lost the Women's Championship in a controversial match with The Fabulous Moolah in October 1985 which saw a real life "screwjob" finish.