What makes a celebrity famous? Is it their personality? Their looks and style? Perhaps their actual talent? Whatever it is, Christina Aguilera has it all. Many celebrities today are famous for certain qualities other than an actual talent. Christina Aguilera doesn't belong in that group, and she has the voice to prove it.
Christina Maria Aguilera was born in Staten Island, New York, on December 18, 1980. She lived a middle class life in the city with her mother, Shelly Kearns, and her father, Fausto Aguilera. Christina had to grow up with a father who was violent towards her and her mother. On her new album, Stripped, Aguilera includes a song she wrote called "I"m OK." This song is about what she went through everyday. The chorus goes "Bruises fade, father, but the pain remains the same./And I still remember how you kept me so afraid./Strength is my mother, for all the love she gave/and every morning that I wake I look back on yesterday/and I"m OK.".
All the drama and fear is surprisingly how Christina became interested in music. She would go into her room and usually sing for her stuffed animals. "As a child, I ran up to my room when all the fighting was going on and everything was all chaotic," Christina explains during a YM magazine interview. Finally, when she was six, her mother left her father, and they moved in with Christina's grandmother in Wexford, Pennsylvania.
At age six, Christina began entering talent contests. She was runner-up on Star Search when she was eight. Two years later, at a Pittsburgh Steelers game, she sang the national anthem. Eventually, she got a spot on the Mickey Mouse Club along with Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and JC Chasez in 1992. Jealously from other kids made her junior high school experience very hard. "She left school in the eighth grade when her career started heating up, and was tutored on the road." (YM, 89) Later on, her best friend, Marcie Reilly, found her a date so she could attend her prom like a normal teenager.