Madonna

The remarkable, hyper-ambitious Material Girl who never stops re-inventing herself, Madonna has sold tens of millions of records and CDs to adoring fans worldwide. Her movie career, however, is another story. Her performances have consistently drawn scathing or laughable reviews from movie critics, and the films have normally had tepid, if any, success at the box office.

Born Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone in August 1958 in Bay City, Michigan, she affected to New York in the later seventies and studied with renowned choreographer Alvin Ailey, joined up with the Patrick Hernandez Revue, formed a pop/dance band called "Breakfast Club" and began working with then boyfriend Stephen Bray on recording several disco-oriented songs. New York producer / DJ Mark Kamins passed her demo tapes to Sire Records in early 1982 and the rest, as they say, is history. The 1980s was Madonna's boom decade, and she dominated the music charts with a sequence of multi-million-selling albums, and her musical and fashion influence on young women was felt about the globe.Madonna first appeared on screen in two low-budget films marketed to a teenaged audience: A Certain Sacrifice (1980) and Vision Quest (1985). However, she scored a small cult hit with Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) starring alongside spunky Rosanna Arquette. Madonna's next drive with then husband Sean Penn, Shanghai Surprise (1986), was savaged by critics, although the resilient star managed to slightly improve her standing with her next two films, the offbeat Who's That Girl (1987) (although she did receive decidedly mixed reviews, they weren't as damaging as those of her previous effort) and the quirky Damon Runyon-inspired Bloodhounds of Broadway (1989). The big-budget and star-filled Dick Tracy (1990) had her playing bad girl "Breathless Mahoney" flirting with Warren Beatty, but the epic failed to get fire at the box office. Taking an earthier role, Madonna was often more entertaining alongside Tom Hanks and Geena Davis in the highly enjoyable A Conference of Their Own (1992), a tale about female baseball players during WWII. However, she again drew the anger of critics with the boring whodunit Body of Evidence (1993), an obvious (and lame) attempt to cash in on the winner of the sexy Sharon Stone thriller Basic Instinct (1992).Several other small screen roles followed, then Madonna starred as Eva Pern in Evita (1996), a pretty well received screen version of the tremendously successful Broadway musical. The Material Girl stayed away from the film cameras for various years, returning to co-star in the lukewarm romantic comedy The Next Best Thing (2000), followed by the painful Swept Away (2002). If those films weren't bad enough, she was woefully miscast as a vampish fencing instructor in the James Bond adventure Die Another Day (2002).