Pop · Broadway · Cabaret
“From Honolulu to Broadway to Hollywood — one unstoppable performer.”
The biography
Bette Midler was born on December 1, 1945, in Honolulu, Hawaii — named after the screen legend Bette Davis — and she arrived in show business with a performer’s instincts already switched on. She moved to New York in the mid-1960s, landed on Broadway in the long-running cast of Fiddler on the Roof, and then built her legend the hard way: singing for late-night crowds at the Continental Baths, a Manhattan bathhouse, with a young Barry Manilow at the piano. Those sets forged the Divine Miss M persona — part 1940s torch singer, part Borscht Belt comic, all nerve — and a devoted following that followed her out of the basement and into the spotlight.
Her 1972 debut album, The Divine Miss M, announced a singer who treated pop history as a playground, reviving the Andrews Sisters’ Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy and slowing Bobby Freeman’s Do You Want to Dance to a smolder; the record made her a star and earned her the Grammy Award for Best New Artist. She conquered film next: her shattering turn as a doomed rock star in The Rose (1979) brought an Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe win, while the title ballad became her signature. Through the disco-era Thighs and Whispers, the 1980s comedy hits Down and Out in Beverly Hills and Ruthless People, and the tearjerker Beaches (1988), Midler kept doing what the Baths had taught her — reading a room and giving it everything.
The record shows the range: top-ten singles in three different decades, a Las Vegas residency, The Showgirl Must Go On, that ran from 2008 to 2010, and a Tony Award for starring in the Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly! in 2017. Few performers have moved so freely between the concert stage, the screen, and Broadway without losing the thread of who they are. Listen to any era of Bette Midler and you hear the same thing the Baths crowds heard: a voice with muscle, a comic with perfect timing, and a survivor who made show business look like the most fun a person can have.