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Amy Winehouse Dead at 27 The beehived soul-jazz diva, 27, was found dead at her London home Saturday. She had been working on a new album since a dismal performance in June led her to cancel her European tour. Recent paparazzi shots had shown her looking healthier and happier, but a comeback was not to be.
Emergency service personnel arrived at her Camden Square townhouse around 4 p.m. local time but were unable to revive her.
"Upon entering," a police spokeswoman stated, "officers found the body of a 27-year-old female who was pronounced dead at the scene. Inquiries continue into the circumstances of the death. At this early stage, it is being treated as unexplained."
PHOTOS: Amy Winehouse
BLOG: Celebrities react to Winehouse's death
She had been heralded as one of pop music's brightest talents in recent years. Her starkly retro recordings and tartly soulful voice drew comparisons to jazz, blues and pop icons from Sarah Vaughan to Ronnie Spector, Etta James to Lauryn Hill. But Winehouse's rising star was almost immediately eclipsed by the erratic and self-destructive behavior that exacerbated her health problems and, eventually, took her life.

By Gareth Cattermole, Getty Images

The body of Amy Winehouse is removed from her London home.
For all the praise she reaped from critics, both here and in her native England, Winehouse was best known for inspiring tabloid coverage. Reports of her struggles with alcohol and drugs, her eating disorders and self-mutilation, her volatile 2-year marriage — to Blake Fielder-Civil, who was arrested twice, first in the beating of a bartender and then under suspicion of trying to bribe him — and other exploits made her a household name, even in households where her albums weren't on the playlist.
Comparisons to other pop stars who died young, from '60s icons such as Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin to 1994 suicide victim Kurt Cobain— all of whom also passed at 27 — are inevitable. But Winehouse was unusually open about her demons, in life and art, often defiantly so. "They tried to make me go to rehab/I said no, no, no," she sang on Rehab, her breakthrough single in the USA, from the 2007 CD Back To Black.
New media and an ever-expanding fascination with celebrities' personal foibles accommodated Winehouse's candor, and vice versa. In late 2007, photos appeared showing a bruised and bleeding Winehouse wandering outside her home in the middle of the night. A video documenting the singer seemingly under the influence of crack cocaine was posted by the U.K.'s The Sun.
Praise from a legend


Singer Tony Bennett recorded the classic pop standard Body And Soul, with Amy Winehouse at Abbey Road Studios in London this past March. He had this to say about the young singer:

"Amy Winehouse was an artist of immense proportions and I am deeply saddened to learn of her tragic passing. She was an extraordinary musician with a rare intuition as a vocalist and I am truly devastated that her exceptional talent has come to such an early end. She was a lovely and intelligent person and when we recorded together she gave a soulful and extraordinary performance."
As her personal life appeared to disintegrate, Winehouse's career continued to flourish. In November 2007, her British debut, Frank, was released in the USA to acclaim, and in December was nominated for six Grammy Awards. The following month, Entertainment Weekly music critic Chris Willman spoke to USA TODAY about Winehouse's dual role as a celebrated rising star and an object of increasingly morbid curiosity.
"The danger of all this bad publicity is that she looks not just like a tragedy in the making, which would actually bolster the sad aura of the songs, but that she's also being made into a cartoonish figure," Willman said. "If she emerges from whatever pyschological or substance-abuse tangle she is in and gets help from people who help her shine as a person as well as an artist, she could be one of our greats, for years or even decades to come."
That February's Grammys proved a triumph for Winehouse. Though she could not secure a U.S. visa in time to attend the ceremony, she performed live via satellite and collected five trophies, including record and song of the year. But she was soon back in the news for other reasons. In April, she was formally cautioned for slapping a man; in June, another video surfaced, this time showing Winehouse singing racial slurs.
That summer, Winehouse was reported to be in the early stages of emphysema. Her father, Mitch Winehouse, publicly attributed the disease to his daughter's chain-smoking and her use of crack cocaine. She was hospitalized several times that summer and fall.
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If her notoriety bothered Winehouse, she seldom let it show. The singer seemed to consciously cultivate a trashy, bad-girl image. With her black beehive and garish makeup, she looked like the leader of a horror-film girl group; her smoky alto and penchant for foul language made her sound like one too.
Speaking to a Washington Post reporter in February 2007, Winehouse revealed the willful rebelliousness that fueled her tragic roller-coaster ride, and the ill-concealed vulnerability that enriched both her music and the pathos of her life. "I know it's good for the record company if I do well here," she said. "I don't care. If I had my choice, I'd be a roller-skating waitress in the middle of nowhere, singing songs to my husband while I'm cooking grits somewhere.
"What I'm doing I'm so grateful to be doing — it's so exciting, so fun. But I've never been the kind of girl who knocks on someone's door and says, 'Make me famous.'"
Last March, Winehouse recorded a duet with Tony Bennett, the standard Body and Soul, at Abbey Road Studios in London; the track will be included on Bennett's second collection of superstar collaborations, Duets II, scheduled for a Sept. 20 release. When notified of Winehouse's untimely death, the 84-year-old pop survivor noted in a statement that she had managed "a soulful and extraordinary performance" when they worked together.
"I am truly devastated that her exceptional talent and has come to such an early end," Bennett noted. "It had been my sincere hope that she would be able to overcome the issues she was battling."