Amy Winehouse's star fell as quickly as it rose. The talented singer and songwriter was as well known for her eclectic vocals and blending of music genres as she was for her front-page stories in tabloids and battles with addiction. Her 2006 album Back to Black is one of the best-selling albums in UK history and made her into an international star. She died of alcohol poisoning on July 23, 2011, at the age of 27. She gave the world hit singles like "Back to Black" and "Rehab" that spoke about heartbreak and addiction, but ironically their tragic details also rang true in her real life.
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00:00Amy Winehouse was one of the most notable musicians of her day. Sadly, however,
00:04she was also notorious for her turbulent private life. From her early troubles to
00:08her untimely passing, this is the tragic real-life story of Amy Winehouse.
00:14Amy Winehouse began to show talent from a very young age. Unfortunately,
00:17she also began to show the first signs of the various troubles that would plague her adult life.
00:22Winehouse was born in 1983 to cab driver Mitch Winehouse and pharmacist Janice Winehouse.
00:27Her childhood was full of music, since so many members of her family were jazz musicians.
00:32She was exposed to a whole range of different musical styles, and by the time she was 10,
00:36she was even part of a Salt-N-Pepa-influenced rap band called Sweet & Sour. In 1996, a 12-year-old
00:42Winehouse managed to get a place at the prestigious Sylvia Young Theater School,
00:46but she was kicked out at just 16. It appears that her rebellious streak may have been raising
00:51its head by this point, as the reason for her expulsion was that the young Winehouse was
00:55failing to apply herself in her studies. It didn't help that she had dared to pierce her nose, too.
01:00Not exactly the most devastating acts of disobedience, sure,
01:03but things weren't going to get smoother from there.
01:06Winehouse was a huge fan of body ink, and one of her most prominent tattoos was an arm piece
01:11picturing a crude pinup girl surrounded with hearts and the name Cynthia. But this wasn't
01:15just some random walking piece. It was a special tribute to Winehouse's grandmother Cynthia,
01:20and she designed it in collaboration with tattoo artist Henry Haight,
01:23who made the deliberately crude piece with little idea that it would go on to become one of the most
01:27recognizable tattoo designs in the world. Haight gets the occasional request to tattoo the same
01:32design on other people, but he always refuses out of respect to Winehouse, and the tattoo's
01:37original meaning. Winehouse was extremely close with her grandmother, who was also a singer and
01:41was highly supportive of her granddaughter's artistic aspirations. Winehouse's first manager,
01:46Nick Chymanski, even considered Cynthia to be the singer's guardian, and both he and Winehouse's
01:51father believed that Cynthia's death was the event that triggered the artist's downward spiral.
01:56During the mid-2000s, Winehouse had a famous — and famously turbulent — love affair with
02:01Blake Fielder-Civil. They started dating in 2005, which also marked the start of
02:05Winehouse's shift in appearance. From the comparatively conventional look of her jazzy
02:09Frank era to her famous tattoos, winged eyeliner, and beehive hairdo, Fielder-Civil has fully
02:15admitted that he was the one who introduced the singer to heroin, crack cocaine, and self-harming.
02:19And although he's said he felt more than guilty about it, it didn't make the pair's relationship
02:24any less difficult. They broke up, got together, and broke up again. They got married and had a
02:28divorce. At least once, they fought so badly that they were reportedly covered with blood and
02:33bruises. Oh, and by the time Winehouse had made her breakthrough and risen to the top of the music
02:38industry, Fielder-Civil was in prison for assault. When she died in 2011, he was in prison again,
02:44this time for attempted robbery and possession of a fake gun.
02:47Yet despite the many, many red flags, Winehouse always seemed to consider Fielder-Civil as
02:52something of a muse. Even during his worst troubles, she showed public support for him
02:56several times, and she famously boasted a tattoo of his name close to her heart.
03:01Winehouse's substance abuse started to spiral out of control around the time her grandmother
03:05became deathly ill in early 2005. What's more, the bulimia she quietly struggled with as a teen
03:10made a comeback, and her rocky relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil wasn't helping things either.
03:15Eventually, things became so bad that her manager, Nick Chymanski, tried his best to convince
03:19Winehouse to go to rehab and sort things out. She was fine with the idea, and everything was in
03:24order, but she wanted her father to back up her attempt to get sober. Mitch Winehouse promised
03:28Chymanski to tell his daughter that the rehab plan was a good idea. But just as happens in
03:33the lyrics to her iconic song, Rehab, Mitch told his daughter that she didn't need to go after all.
03:38My dad did actually go, you're right, I need to go. So I said, all right dad,
03:41I'll go meet him and then we'll back out, which I did."
03:44She didn't need to go to rehab.
03:47This incident has widely been described as Winehouse's last chance at tackling her issues,
03:51before becoming a sought-after superstar made it doubly more difficult. And while she did
03:56eventually give rehab a shot in 2008, by then, it was far too late.
04:00Amy Winehouse did more than her share of walking on the wild side, so it's not exactly a shock
04:05that she had a few run-ins with the police over the years. A lot of this unwelcome attention from
04:10the law seems to have coincided with the turbulent years after Back to Black propelled her to
04:14superstardom. Tragically, it also seems to be in connection with her issues with substance abuse.
04:19In 2007, Winehouse was arrested in Norway and spent the night in custody for cannabis possession.
04:25This wasn't her only arrest that year, however, as she was also briefly arrested due to an
04:29unspecified case involving her husband, Blake Fielder-Civil. Winehouse's troubles with the
04:34law continued in 2008, when she was arrested for allegedly assaulting someone outside a bar in
04:39London. There was another assault allegation against her that year, along with an incident
04:43that saw her arrested for alleged drug offenses. That wasn't the end of it, either. In 2009,
04:48the singer ended up in court for allegedly punching a dancer in the eye at the backstage
04:52of a summer ball, after said dancer had asked for a selfie with her. Later that year, Winehouse
04:57attacked a theater owner who was trying to stop her from making a scene at a performance of Cinderella.
05:02Everyone who's even passingly familiar with Amy Winehouse's story knows about
05:05her long-running struggles with addiction. After she gained recognition in the British media,
05:10she began to drink heavily, possibly as a way of dealing with the pressures of fame.
05:14But I don't think I'm gonna be at all famous. I don't think I can handle it."
05:22Things only became worse after Blake Fielder-Civil introduced her to hard drugs.
05:26By 2009, Winehouse's addictions had started to severely affect both her voice and her career,
05:32and she was notorious for appearing onstage visibly drunk. The crowds started booing her,
05:37and concerts were canceled. And although Winehouse's representatives attributed these
05:41bumps in the road to health issues, her troubles with alcohol were obvious to pretty much everyone.
05:46Unfortunately, she was unable to correct the course.
05:49It was alcohol that ultimately killed her in 2011, at just 27 years old.
05:54On paper, Amy Winehouse's tragic tale of fame, addiction, death seems like a fairly straightforward
05:59story. But there might be more to the tale than that. Asif Kapadia, the director of the Oscar-winning
06:05documentary Amy, believes that the artist may have suffered from brain damage that, as he put it,
06:09prevented her from thinking straight. Kapadia bases his theory on a claim that Winehouse had
06:14a number of overdoses and seizures during her years of substance abuse. But he's not the first
06:19person to speculate on the potential damage to the singer's brain. In 2008, the press reported
06:24that medical professionals had warned Winehouse that another drug binge might actually kill her,
06:28and that several doctors were genuinely concerned that the vast amount of drugs she was taking could
06:32leave her with brain damage. It's hard to know how accurate this is, however, considering the
06:37way the media treated her at the time. It's probably fair to say that at some
06:41point in their careers, most British celebrities have had to struggle with unwanted attention from
06:45the country's tabloids. However, Amy Winehouse had to play the press game on hard mode.
06:50Much of this was because the media field was shifting at the time. As a troubled famous
06:54person prone to the occasional public meltdown in an era before YouTube and Facebook had gotten big,
07:00she was in the worst possible place at the worst possible time when it came to unwanted media
07:04attention. People can never get enough of celebrities with difficulties, and Winehouse
07:08pretty much led that twisted voyeurism into the digital age. Because her face attached to a cover
07:14story was basically a license to print money, she was constantly hounded by the paparazzi.
07:19Asif Kapadia, director of the documentary Amy, says that the singer was essentially trapped in
07:23a situation where almost everybody close to her had a media deal of some sort, leaving everyone
07:28looking out for their own interests, and she herself getting more and more lost in the middle
07:32of it all. Often, artists can seem completely doomed with their careers all but dead in the
07:37water, and then they unexpectedly get their act together to reemerge in a glorious comeback that
07:42sets them back on the right path. Unfortunately, not everyone can pull this off, because it
07:46requires the artist to have actually spent some time wrestling their demons into submission.
07:50Amy Winehouse certainly hadn't accomplished this when she embarked on her comeback tour in 2011.
07:56Winehouse had largely avoided the stage for the previous two years, so her European tour had all
08:00the markings of a grand comeback. But when she entered the stage in Belgrade, Serbia,
08:05it was evident this comeback was going to be anything but glorious. It was, however,
08:09a painful demonstration that her addiction issues were far from behind her.
08:13Winehouse randomly stopped a song halfway through to introduce the band, only to barely remember
08:18their names. She suddenly made a freaked-out backup dancer take over the vocals on Valerie.
08:23At one point, she decided to take off a shoe. All in all, the media considered the concert
08:27the worst in Belgrade's history, and even the country's minister of defense called it, in his
08:32words, a huge shame and a disappointment. The rest of the tour was promptly canceled.
08:37We're going to turn now to a major loss in the music world tonight. The gifted singer
08:41Amy Winehouse found dead in her London home. She was just 27.
08:45After years of excruciating public struggles with drugs, alcohol,
08:48and the law, Amy Winehouse's life came to an end on July 23, 2011. Winehouse was only 27
08:55years old when she died, and her cause of death was ruled as accidental alcohol poisoning.
08:59Before her death, she had developed a pattern in which she stayed sober for weeks before
09:03falling off the wagon with a drinking binge. Eventually, her body just couldn't take anymore.
09:08Winehouse was found lifeless in her room the next morning with a staggering blood alcohol level of
09:130.416 at the time of her death. Of course, it's worth pointing out that Winehouse's death almost
09:18certainly was accidental. Shortly before her death, Winehouse had specifically told doctors
09:23that she didn't wish to die, and that she was looking forward to her future. By all accounts,
09:27the death of Amy Winehouse really was a tragic mistake.
09:31In 2013, Winehouse's brother Alex Winehouse put forward an alternate theory for the cause
09:36of her death. He doesn't exactly contest the coroner's ruling of death by misadventure,
09:40and he fully admits that his famous sister's vast drug and alcohol levels did no favors to her
09:45health. However, Alex feels that it wasn't narcotics that most contributed to his sister's
09:49untimely passing, but an eating disorder. Winehouse had struggled with bulimia for years,
09:54and her brother feels that her physique was significantly weakened by periods of extreme
09:58overeating and the bouts of vomiting and depression that typically follow.
10:02Alex Winehouse says that the condition stemmed from the singer's teenage years,
10:05when she had a group of friends who would eat and throw up food together.
10:09He says that most of them eventually stopped, but the condition stuck with his sister,
10:12and since she wasn't prepared to really talk about it, her eating disorder was a difficult
10:16issue to bring up. Still, Alex decided to breach the subject after his sister's death in order
10:21to raise awareness for the condition. Today, he co-runs the Amy Winehouse Foundation in his sister's
10:26name.