Cyndi Lauper

Cyndi Lauper, born Cynthia Ann Stephanie Lauper on June 22, 1953, is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and Broadway book writer. She grew up in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, New York, and began writing songs and playing acoustic guitar at age 12, an instrument given to her by her sister. After being expelled from Richmond Hill High School, she later earned her GED. At 17, she left home to escape an abusive stepfather, spending time in Canada and eventually taking art classes at Johnson State College in Vermont while supporting herself through odd jobs. In 2019, Northern Vermont University–Johnson awarded her an honorary Doctor of Letters degree when she delivered the institution's commencement address.

Lauper's professional music career began in the late 1970s when she co-founded the band Blue Angel with saxophonist John Turi. The group signed with Polydor Records and released their sole studio album in 1980. Though critically noted, the record sold poorly, and a subsequent legal dispute with their former manager forced Lauper into bankruptcy. She temporarily lost her voice during this period due to an inverted cyst in her vocal cord. After the band dissolved, she worked retail jobs, waitressed, and performed in local New York clubs. In 1981, manager David Wolff helped her secure a recording contract with Portrait Records, a subsidiary of Epic Records.

Her debut solo album, She's So Unusual, released on October 14, 1983, became the first debut album by a female artist to produce four consecutive top-five hits on the Billboard Hot 100: "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," "Time After Time," "She Bop," and "All Through the Night." The album peaked at number four in the United States and reached the top five in eight additional countries, remaining in the Top 200 charts for more than 65 weeks and eventually selling 16 million copies worldwide. Lauper co-wrote four songs on the record, including "Time After Time" and "She Bop," and rewrote the lyrics to "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," which she found misogynistic in its original form, recasting it as an anthem for young women. At the 27th Annual Grammy Awards in 1985, she won Best New Artist. The music video for "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" took home Best Female Video at the inaugural 1984 MTV Video Music Awards.

Her second album, True Colors, released in 1986, produced two additional top-five hits with the title track and "Change of Heart." Lauper's chart presence continued through subsequent decades, with singles including "The Goonies 'R' Good Enough" in 1985, "I Drove All Night" in 1989, and multiple number-one entries on the Hot Dance Club Play charts in the 2000s, among them "Same Ol' Story" and "Into the Nightlife" in 2008. In 2010, her album Memphis Blues topped Billboard's Blues Albums chart for 13 consecutive weeks, making it the most successful blues album of that year on the chart. Since 1983, Lauper has released twelve studio albums in total.

On Broadway, Lauper appeared in the 2006 production of Threepenny Opera. She later composed the music and lyrics for the Broadway musical Kinky Boots, for which she won the Tony Award for Best Original Score Written for the Theatre in 2013, becoming the first woman to win that category as a sole composer. Kinky Boots received five additional Tony Awards that year, including Best Musical. The cast recording earned Lauper the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album in 2014, and the West End production of the show won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical in 2016.

Lauper's cumulative 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, placing her among the few performers to have won three of the four major American entertainment awards. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in November 2025. She's So Unusual appears on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Beyond her recording and theatrical work, Lauper has been recognized for her humanitarian efforts, particularly her advocacy for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Over the course of her career, she has sold more than 50 million records worldwide.