Furtado came to fame in 2000 with the release of her debut album Whoa, Nelly! , which featured the Grammy Award-winning single "I'm like a Bird". After giving birth to daughter Nevis and releasing the less commercially successful Folklore (2003), she returned to prominence in 2006 with the release of Loose and its hit singles "Promiscuous" and "Maneater".

Furtado, a first-generation Portuguese Canadian, was born as one of three children to Maria Manuela and Antonio Jose Furtado, Portuguese immigrants from Sao Miguel Island in the Azores. She was named after Soviet gymnast Nellie Kim.

Nelly first sang at the age of four when she performed a duet with her mother at church on Portugal Day. She began playing instruments at the age of nine, learning the trombone, ukulele and, in later years, the guitar and keyboard. She began writing songs at the age of twelve and, as a teenager, she played in a Portuguese marching band.

During these early years, Furtado embraced many musical genres, listening heavily to mainstream R&B, hip hop, alternative rock, New Wave, alternative hip hop, trip hop, world music (including Portuguese fado, Brazilian bossa nova, and Indian music), and a variety of others. Her influences have included Jeff Buckley, Caetano Veloso, Amalia Rodrigues, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Cornershop, TLC, Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, Digable Planets, De La Soul, Radiohead, Oasis, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Verve, U2, and Beck.

The first musicians Furtado interacted with were underground rappers and DJs. During a visit to Toronto, after the summer of eleventh grade, she met Tallis Newkirk, member of hip hop group Plains of Fascination and contributed vocals to their 1996 album Join the Ranks on the track "Waitin' 4 the Streets". She spent the rest of that summer in Portugal, opening her mind to native rock acts and then returned to British Columbia. After graduating from Mount Douglas Secondary School in 1996, she moved to Toronto where she eventually formed the trip hop duo Nelstar in 1997 with Newkirk. The experience led her back to her hip-hop influences and allowed her to become more comfortable with writing her own melodies and rhymes. But feeling that she couldnТt showcase her vocal ability she left the group and decided to move back home.

Before moving, she performed at the 1997 Honey Jam, a female, mostly-black talent show at Toronto nightclub Lee's Palace. She performed to a Digital Audio Tape in jeans and a t-shirt. At the club, The Philosopher Kings singer Gerald Eaton (aka Jarvis Church) was impressed with her performance and approached her to write with him. Eaton and fellow Kings member Brian West, collectively known as Track and Field, helped Furtado produce a demo, but she already had plans to backpack through Europe and return home to take creative writing courses at Camosun College. Then she eventually returned for two weeks; the material recorded during those sessions led to her record deal with DreamWorks Records in 1999.

Furtado continued to collaborate with Eaton and West, who co-produced her debut album, Whoa, Nelly! The album saw major success all over the globe supported by its singles, "I'm like a Bird", "Turn off the Light", "...On the Radio", and "Hey, Man!". It received four Grammy nominations in 2002, and her debut single won for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Furthermore, Furtado was critically acclaimed for her innovative mixture of various genres and sounds.

Before the release of her sophomore album, Folklore, Furtado gave birth to her first child, daughter Nevis. On September 20, 2003 in Toronto, she had a home birth with midwives. Nevis's father is Furtado's then boyfriend, DJ/producer Jasper Gahunia aka Lil' Jaz. Furtado and Gahunia, who broke up in 2005, were together for four years and friends for several years before that.

Furtado's second album, Folklore, was released in November 2003. The title was influenced by her parents immigration to Canada. The album also displayed a diverse sound but with a more rock-oriented, acoustic approach. As she focused more on the songwriting rather "than on frenetically switching genres five times in one song", BBC felt that it had "twice the originality" of her debut. Furtado attributed the mellowness of the album to the fact that she was pregnant during most of its recording. The final track on the album, "Childhood Dreams", is dedicated to her daughter.

The album was not as successful as her debut, partly due to troubles at DreamWorks Records and the less poppy sound. It lacked promotion because DreamWorks was sold to Universal Music Group at the time of Folkore'srelease. In 2005, DreamWorks Records was shut down, and many of its artists, including Furtado, were absorbed into Geffen Records.

Furtado's third album, Loose, was released in June 2006. It was named after the spontaneous, creative decisions she faced while creating the album. Four lead singles were released in different regions of the world: the Spanish reggaeton-influenced "No Hay Igual" (featuring Calle 13), the hip-hop "Promiscuous" (featuring Timbaland), for which she won a 2006 Billboard Music Award for Pop Single of the Year, the latin "Te Busque" (featuring Juanes) and the pop "Maneater". For the first time, Furtado worked with a variety of record producers and followed a more collaborative approach in creating the album. She has categorized the album's sound as punk-hop, which she describes as "this modern, poppy, spooky music".

Nelly is also an actress. She began acting in school plays in middle school. She formally began studying acting after she planned to appear in a Hindi film which never came to fruition Acting courses taught her to "let go of [her] ego and feel really grounded"; this influenced the theme and creation of her third album Loose. She prepared for a role in a second film, the independent drama Nobody's Hero (2006), but plans fell through as filming conflicted with the promotion of Loose.

prominence ['prOmInqns] Ц известность

ukulele ["jHkq'leIlI] - укулеле (четырЄхструнный музыкальный инструмент)

to embrace [Im'breIs] Ц охватывать

to showcase ['SqukeIs] Ц демонстрировать

to backpack ['bxkpxk] Ц путешествовать с рюкзаком

sophomore ['sOfqmL] Ц второй по счету

midwife ['mIdwaIf] Ц акушерка

mellowness ['melqunIs] Ц зрелость

fruition [fru(:)'IS(q)n] Ц осуществление

Sharon Osbourne doesn't look like a Monster of Rock. The petite, demure 54-year-old seems far from the ferocious, ball-breaking figure of legend. That is, this self-effacing, almost prim woman begins to tell a few stories. "I see that Eminem gets in trouble for singing about killing his wife," she says, with a tilted grin. "At least my husband actually tried to do it!" Ah, yes. Her husband. For 20 years, Sharon Osbourne has been married to Ozzy, the Black Sabbath singer and heavy rock demigod. It's well documented that their union hit a low in August 1989, when the star returned from playing, ironically, a peace festival in Moscow. Ozzy sank four bottles of complimentary vodka, informed his wife, "I've decided you have to go," and tried to strangle her. "I called the police, and they locked him up," Osbourne reminisces, with an oddly affectionate chuckle. "I didn't press charges but he went into rehab for three months. He was totally insane from all the drink and drugs he was doing, and well, these things happen." In early 2000s Sharon and Ozzy debuted on the Rich List with a joint fortune of ?40m. She generated more than half of it, mainly through her artist management activities, as well as the launch and promotion of Ozzfest, the gargantuan heavy metal festival that has toured the US annually for the last ten years. Osbourne is a pint-sized, dignified, immaculately groomed, middle-aged rock chick. Her accent skips between her native London, Ozzy's doleful Brummie twang and the easy drawl that betrays the couple's last decade in LA raising their three children. Clearly, though, she has a core of pure steel.

Osbourne launched the phenomenally successful Ozzfest in the US in 1996 as an aggrieved riposte to a perceived slight. A few months earlier, she had approached the organisers of Lollapalooza, the achingly hip bohemian travelling rock festival, to ask if Ozzy could play that year's event. "They laughed at the idea," she recalls, eyes burning at the injustice. "They all thought Ozzy was so uncool. So I thought, 'Right, I'll organise my own fucking festival.'" Lollapalooza is long gone now but Ozzfest now grosses $20m every summer in the US, and has launched the careers of Marilyn Manson, Limp Bizkit and Slipknot.

Ozzfest has successfully rehabilitated Ozzy Osbourne from the lost, drugged-up pantomime figure of the late 1980s to a force in music, and nobody who has observed the process seriously doubts that the grounded Mrs O has been his saviour. Her devotion to him is indisputable. "He's a legend," she says, simply. "I admire him and I love him."

Osbourne's early emotional life was troubled. Her father was Don Arden, the legendarily heavy-handed and confrontational svengali manager of Gene Vincent, the Small Faces and, later, Black Sabbath. Arden was frequently accused of violent, bullying tactics by his artists. His daughter followed him into the family business: "If he'd been a butcher, I'd be slicing lamb chops now."

In 1979, Black Sabbath sacked Ozzy. Sharon Arden began to date him, and took over his management from her father. Don Arden was livid. The next time she visited him, his vicious pet dogssavagedher. She was pregnant, and lost the child. "It was horrific," she winces. In the mid-1980s, Don Arden faced trial for false imprisonment and blackmail of business associates, but was acquitted. His son David was found guilty of the same charge and jailed. Osbourne has had no contact with her father for 20 years, but the wounds still fester. "The best lesson I ever had was watching him fuck his business up," she says. "He taught me everything not to do. My father's never even seen any of my three kids and, as far as I'm concerned, he never will."

When Osbourne took over Ozzy's career, the heavy rocker was in a severe drink and drug-fuelled decline and she wasn't too far behind. She was once arrested in LA for drink-driving and bailed out by her best friend, Britt Ekland. Osbourne awoke the next day oblivious to the incident until Ekland jogged her memory. Through these dark days, her shrewd management skills just about kept the family business on the road, but Ozzy and Sharon became notorious for their Sid and Nancy-style alcoholic antics. "Our fights were legendary," she recalls. "We'd beat the shit out of each other. At a gig, Ozzy would run off stage during a guitar solo to fight with me, then run back on to finish the song! We were in the gutter, morally, and I realised that if we both carried on, we'd wind up a washed-up pair of old drunks living in a hovel somewhere. So I stopped drinking."

Nevertheless, she continued to tolerate her husband's excesses. On one occasion she flew to Tokyo to join him on tour. After the show she went ahead to their hotel room, only to be woken hours later by a young Japanese girl climbing into their bed. A drunken Ozzy had forgotten his wife had arrived. "It's funny now," she says, with a tight smile. "It wasn't then."

The Osbournes had three children in the late 1980s, but it took the shock of his 1989 murder attempt to wean Ozzy off the bottle. By then his wife had begun to forge a reputation as one of the most driven and uncompromising managers in the music industry. The industry had confidently expected her to fail, and Osbourne whole-heartedly set about proving them wrong. "People would openly say, 'You and Ozzy won't last,'" she remembers. "They expected him to have a big-titted blonde trophy wife and he'd got me, a short, fat, hairy half-Jew. I had a lot to fight against."

Family unity became even more paramount for the Osbournes in 1992 when Ozzy was diagnosed as suffering from multiple sclerosis, announced his retirement and played a farewell tour. Six months later a second opinion pronounced the diagnosis a false alarm, but the family have only now publicly acknowledged the scare.

Sharon Osbourne's career has been powered by one major imperative: to avoid replicating the sins of her father. "I don't want my kids to ever go through what I had to," she says, emphatically and repeatedly. She's particularly concerned that her children respect the metal fans who afford them their privileged lifestyle. "I caught the kids giggling once at some Ozzy fans," she says. "I was so angry. I said to them, 'Don't you ever laugh at those people, because they're the reason we live in the house we do, drive the car we do, and you go to the schools you do. Show some respect.'"

Ozzy Osbournegarnered still greater celebrity status by the unlikely success of his own brand of reality television. The Osbournes, a series featuring the domestic life of Osbourne and his family (wife Sharon, children Jack and Kelly, but not his oldest daughter Aimee, who declined to participate), has turned into one of MTV's greatest hits. It premiered on March 5 2002, and the final episode aired March 21 2005. Forget the Simpsons, the Addams family and the Munsters, if you really want to see the "fun" put back into "dysfunctional", Ozzy and his brood are for you. Highlights include Ozzy struggling - with frequently-bleeped dialogue throughout - to install a DVD player, operate a vacuum cleaner and deal with his seemingly incontinent household pets. America's TV Guide has described the series, which also includes rows with the next-door neighbours, teenage tantrums and Ozzy's unique philosophising, as "a cross between The Simpsons and This Is Spinal Tap". Its star is at a loss to explain the show's popularity: "I suppose Americans get a kick out of watching a crazy Brit family like us make complete fools of ourselves every week," he muses.

Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne are one of the UK's richest couples, according to the Sunday Times Rich List. They ranked #458 in the 2005 list, with an estimated ?100 million earned from recording, touring and TV shows. They ranked above most music stars, such as Rod Stewart, George Michael, Robbie Williams, the Rolling Stones' Charlie Watts and Ron Wood, and Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Queen, and Dire Straits members.

booze [bHz] Ц спиртное, запой

demure [dI'muq] Ц рассудительный

ferocious [fq'rquS(q)s] Ц дикий, свирепый

prim [prIm] Ц чопорный

grin [grIn] Ц усмешка

to strangle ['strxNgl] Ц задушить

rehab ['rJhxb] Ц реабилитаци€

gargantuan [gR'gxntjuqn] Ц колоссально огромный

immaculately [I'mxkjlItlI] Ц безупречно

doleful ['dqulful] Ц печальный, меланхоличный

core [kL] Ц €дро, серцевина

riposte [rI'pqust] Ц ответный удар

bohemian [bqu'hJmjqn] Ц богемный

bullying ['bulIN] Ц запугивание

to sack [sxk] Ц (sl.) увольн€ть с работы

livid ['lIvId] Ц вне себ€ от €рости

vicious ['vISqs] Ц злой

to savage ['sxvIG] Ц кусать, нападать

to wince [wIns] Ц вздрагивать, морщитьс€

to acquit [q'kwIt] Ц оправдывать

to fester ['festq] Ц мучить

to bail out ['beIl"Qut] Ц освобождать из заключени€ под залог

to jog [GOg] Ц напомнить

antics ['xntIks] Ц эксцентричный поступок

hovel ['hOvql] Ц сарай

to wean [wJn] Ц отучать

to forge [fLG] Ц выдумывать

replicating ['replIkeItIN] Ц повторение

to garner ['gRnq] Ц собирать

brood [brHd] Ц выводок

incontinent [In'kOntInqnt] Ц несдержанный

to muse [mjHz] Ц размышл€ть

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