Britney Spears

Britney Jean Spears (born December 2, 1981) is an American singer.

Britney Jean Spears was born on December 2, 1981, in McComb, Mississippi, the second child of James "Jamie" Parnell Spears and Lynne Irene Bridges.

Her maternal grandmother, Lillian Portell, was English (born in London), and one of Spears' maternal grandfathers was Maltese.

Her siblings are Bryan James Spears and Jamie Lynn Spears.

In her memoir The Woman in Me, Spears wrote that her paternal grandmother, Emma Jean Spears, was sent to an asylum by Spears' paternal grandfather.

Their three-day-old baby had died and Emma Jean was overwhelmed by grief.

While at the asylum, she was put on lithium; subsequently, she shot herself over the child's grave.

Born in the Bible Belt, where socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a particularly strong religious influence, she was baptized as a Southern Baptist and sang in a church choir as a child.

As an adult, she has studied Kabbalist teachings.

On August 5, 2021, Spears announced that she had converted to Catholicism.

Her mother, sister, and nieces Maddie Aldridge and Ivey Joan Watson, are also Catholic.

However, on September 5, 2022, after Spears' ex-husband, Kevin Federline, and youngest son did an interview defending her father's actions during her conservatorship, she stated: "I don't believe in God anymore because of the way my children and my family have treated me. There is nothing to believe in anymore. I'm an atheist y'all".

At age three, Spears began attending dance lessons in her hometown of Kentwood, Louisiana, and was selected to perform as a solo artist at the annual recital.

Aged five she made her local stage debut, singing "What Child Is This?" at her kindergarten graduation.

During her childhood, she also had gymnastics and voice lessons and won many state-level competitions and children's talent shows.

Often referred to as the "Princess of Pop", she is credited with influencing the revival of teen pop during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Spears has sold over 150 million records worldwide, making her one of the world's best-selling music artists.

She has earned numerous awards and accolades, including a Grammy Award, 15 Guinness world records, six MTV Video Music Awards, seven Billboard Music Awards (including the Millennium Award), the inaugural Radio Disney Icon Award, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Her heavily choreographed videos earned her the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award.

After appearing in stage productions and television series, Spears signed with Jive Records in 1997 at age fifteen.

Her first two studio albums, ...Baby One More Time (1999) and Oops!... I Did It Again (2000), are among the best-selling albums of all time and made Spears the best-selling teenage artist of all time.

With first-week sales of over 1.3 million copies, Oops!... I Did It Again held the record for the fastest-selling album by a female artist in the United States for fifteen years.

In the United States, Spears is the fourth best-selling female album artist of the Nielsen SoundScan era, as well as the best-selling female album artist of the 2000s.

She was ranked by Billboard as the eighth-biggest artist of the 2000s.

Spears has had six number-one albums on the Billboard 200 and five number-one singles on the US Billboard Hot 100: "...Baby One More Time", "Womanizer", "3", "Hold It Against Me", and "S&M (Remix)".

Other hit singles include "Oops!... I Did It Again", "I'm a Slave 4 U", "Toxic", "Gimme More", and "Piece of Me".

Spears adopted a more mature and provocative style for her albums Britney (2001) and In the Zone (2003), and starred in the 2002 film Crossroads.

Forbes has reported Spears as the highest-earning female musician of 2001 and 2012.

In 2004, Spears launched a perfume brand with Elizabeth Arden, Inc.; sales exceeded $1.5 billion.

She was executive producer of her fifth studio album, Blackout (2007), often referred to as her best work.

Following a series of highly publicized personal problems, promotion for the album was limited, and Spears was involuntarily placed in a conservatorship.

Subsequently, Spears released the chart-topping albums, Circus (2008) and Femme Fatale (2011), the latter of which became her most successful era of singles in the US charts.

With "3" in 2009 and "Hold It Against Me" in 2011, Spears became the second artist after Mariah Carey in the Billboard Hot 100's history to debut at number one with two or more songs.

By 2012, she had topped Yahoo!'s list of most searched celebrities seven times in twelve years.

Time named Spears one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2021.

Spears placed first in the Time reader poll.

She embarked on a four-year concert residency, Britney: Piece of Me, at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino in Las Vegas to promote her next two albums Britney Jean (2013) and Glory (2016).

In 2019, Spears' legal battle over her conservatorship became more publicized and led to the establishment of the #FreeBritney movement.

In 2021, the conservatorship was terminated following her public testimony in which she accused her management team and family of abuse.

"...Baby One More Time" was named the greatest debut single of all time by Rolling Stone in 2020.