Helen Reddy

Origins and early life

Helen Maxine Reddy was born in Melbourne into a show-business family and was performing at the age of four; she won a talent contest on the television programme Bandstand in 1966, whose prize was a ticket to New York and an audition that came to nothing, and only after Chicago and Los Angeles did the records begin.

Work and career

Through the 1970s she placed fifteen singles in the American top forty, six of them in the top ten and three at number one, among them I Am Woman, the song that became an anthem of the women's movement; she also placed twenty-five songs on the adult contemporary chart, eight of them at number one. In 1974 she won the first American Music Award for favourite female pop and rock artist, and she was the first Australian to host a weekly prime-time variety hour on an American network, with specials seen in more than forty countries.

She converted to Judaism in 1968, before her marriage to Jeff Wald, with whom she had a son. She retired from the stage in 2002, went back to university in Australia and practised as a clinical hypnotherapist.