Diana Ross (born Diane Ernestine Earle Ross on March 26 1944) is a twelve-time Grammy Award-nominated American singer, record producer and actress, whose musical repertoire spans R&B, soul, pop, disco, and jazz.
During the 1970's and into the early to mid 1980's, Ross became the most successful female artist of the rock era, while crossing over into film, television and Broadway. Over the course of her career, Ross has been awarded a Tony Award for the music special An Evening with Diana Ross (1977), seven American Music Awards, and the Golden Globe Award for New Star Of The Year - Actress for her leading role in the Billie Holiday biographical film Lady Sings the Blues (1972). Additionally, Ross has been nominated for twelve Grammy Awards and an Academy Award for Best Actress. She was also recently honored by The Kennedy Center. She has sold 85+ million singles & albums during the course of her forty-five-year career. In 1976, Billboard magazine named her the female entertainer of the century. Guinness World Records declared Diana Ross as the most successful female music artist of the 20th century with a total of eighteen American number-one singles: twelve as lead singer of The Supremes and six as a solo artist. Ross was the first female solo artist to score six number-ones. She is also one of the few artists to have two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—one as a solo artist and the other as a member of the Supremes.
In 1999, as a solo artist, she was ranked #38 on VH1's "The 100 Greatest Women in Rock and Roll", while The Supremes ranked #16.
Diana Patience Beverly Ross (July 8, 1910 - May 4, 2000), relative of Robert Ross, was an English children's author and occasional and longtime resident of Shaw, near Melksham, in Wiltshire. A graduate of the Central School of Art in London, she also worked on sculpture and graphic arts and illustrated several of her own books under the name of her cat, Gri.
In her early twenties, Ross worked at the Grenfell Mission orphanage in St. Anthony and would later help Wilfred Grenfell to research his history, The Romance of Labrador, as well as, without credit, drawing the book's illustrations.
Beginning with The Little Red Engine Gets a Name (1942), followed by The Story of the Little Red Engine (1945) (ISBN 0-233-00147-6) and seven more volumes, Ross created a series of picture books which followed the adventures of the same character. Jan Lewitt and George Him provided the illustrations for the first volume and Leslie Wood its sequels.
Ross had several of her short works read alone for BBC radio broadcasts for children and wrote several volumes of modern fairy tales for older chldren. Ross also had an un-credited part in the creation of the BBC children's television series Camberwick Green.
Suffering from Alzheimer's Disease and polyneuritis, she lived the last ten years of her life with her daughter and son-in-law in Newcastle upon Tyne.
