Stephanie Mills

After a successful career on Broadway, Stephanie Mills reinvented herself as a chart-topping R&B singer, landing a string of crossover hits on the American charts during the late-1970s and 1980s. She was born on March 22, 1957, and grew up in Brooklyn's Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood, where she began singing at Cornerstone Baptist Church. She became a Broadway actress at age 9, appearing in Maggie Flynn alongside fellow child star Irene Cara, who would later co-write and perform the 1983 hit "Flashdance… What a Feeling." Starting in 1974, Mills began a five-year run as Dorothy in the original production of The Wiz, which moved to Broadway in 1975 and won seven Tony Awards. She left the production in 1979 to focus on her music career, earning a gold-selling Top 40 hit that same year with the title track to her album What Cha Gonna Do with My Lovin'. The album itself also went gold, as did the follow-up releases Sweet Sensation and Stephanie, both of which peaked at Number 3 on the US R&B chart. Mills earned a Grammy Award for 1980's "Never Knew Love Like This Before" and remained prolific throughout the rest of the decade, releasing a number of Top 10 albums while also hosting an NBC-TV daytime talk show. She returned to the top of the charts during the decade's latter half with a string of Number 1 hits, including 1987's "(You're Puttin') A Rush on Me" and 1989's "Something in the Way (You Make Me Feel)." Mills continued balancing her theater and musical commitments during the 1990s and released a comeback album, Born For This, in 2004.