Helen Reddy

Helen Maxine Reddy, born on 25 October 1941 in Melbourne, Australia, was a singer, actress, television host, and activist who became one of the most prominent popular music figures of the 1970s. She died on 29 September 2020. Reddy came from a well-established Australian showbusiness family: her father, Maxwell David Reddy, born in Melbourne in 1914, worked as a writer, producer, and actor, while her mother, Stella Campbell, was an actress, singer, and dancer who appeared regularly on the television programs Homicide, Bellbird, and Country Town. Her half-sister Toni Lamond and her nephew Tony Sheldon are both actor-singers. Reddy had Irish, Scottish, and English ancestry; her great-great-grandfather Edward Reddy was born in Dublin in 1855, and her Scottish great-grandfather Thomas Lamond served as a one-time mayor of Waterloo, New South Wales. Patsy Reddy, a former New Zealand governor-general, is a distant cousin.

Reddy began performing at age four, joining her parents on the Australian vaudeville circuit. During her teenage years she stepped away from performing, and she married Kenneth Claude Weate, an older musician and family friend. Following their divorce, she raised her daughter Traci as a single mother and returned to performing, focusing on singing after health problems — including the removal of a kidney at age seventeen — prevented her from dancing. She sang on radio and television in Australia before winning a talent contest on the television program Bandstand in 1966, with the prize nominally being a trip to New York City and a recording opportunity with Mercury Records. Upon arriving in New York, she was told that the Bandstand footage itself constituted her audition, which Mercury deemed unsuccessful. Despite having only two hundred US dollars and a return ticket to Australia, she chose to remain in the United States with three-year-old Traci.

Her early years in the United States were marked by financial hardship and limited work opportunities, as the absence of a work permit made singing engagements difficult to secure. In 1968 she met Jeff Wald, then a secretary at the William Morris Agency, at a party in New York City; the two married shortly afterward. The couple eventually relocated from New York to Chicago, where Reddy built a reputation performing in local venues including Mister Kelly's. That same year she signed with Fontana Records, a division of Mercury Records, and released her debut single "One Way Ticket," which reached number 83 in Australia. She subsequently moved to Los Angeles, where she signed with Capitol Records and released "I Believe in Music" in 1970; the B-side of that single, "I Don't Know How to Love Him," reached number eight on the Canadian RPM pop chart.

Throughout the 1970s, Reddy achieved substantial international success, placing fifteen singles on the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100, six of which reached the top ten and three of which hit number one. Her signature song, "I Am Woman," was one of those chart-toppers and became widely recognized as an anthem of second-wave feminism, earning Reddy a reputation as a feminist icon. She placed twenty-five songs on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart, with fifteen reaching the top ten and eight reaching number one, six of them consecutively. At the inaugural American Music Awards in 1974, she won the award for Favorite Pop/Rock Female Artist. On television, she became the first Australian to host a one-hour weekly primetime variety show on an American network, and her specials were broadcast in more than forty countries. In 2011, Billboard ranked her the twenty-eighth adult contemporary artist of all time, and the ninth among women. The Chicago Tribune referred to her as the "Queen of '70s Pop" in 2013.

Her last single to chart in the United States was "I Can't Say Goodbye to You" in 1981. During the 1980s and 1990s, Reddy shifted her focus toward acting in musicals and recording albums, including Center Stage. In 1993, she appeared on Broadway in Blood Brothers. She retired from live performance in 2002, returned to university in Australia, earned a degree, and went on to practice as a clinical hypnotherapist and motivational speaker. In 2011, after singing "Breezin' Along with the Breeze" with her half-sister Toni Lamond at Lamond's birthday celebration, Reddy chose to return to live performing.