Bryan Adams - Rotten Tomatoes Celebrity Profile

Biography

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Bryan Adams, OC, OBC (born 5 November 1959) is a Canadian rock singer, guitarist and songwriter. Some of his best-known albums are Reckless, Waking up the Neighbours and 18 'Til I Die.

Adams was awarded the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia for his contribution to popular music and his philanthropic work. He was also inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame in 1998, and more recently inducted into the Music Hall of Fame at Canada's Juno Awards April 2006. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards for songwriting.

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Early life

Adams, was born in Kingston, Ontario, and travelled throughout Europe and the Middle East with his diplomat parents most of the 1960's, until they settled back in Canada in 1973. Adams started his musical career after dropping out of school at the age of 15.

Musical career

At the age of seventeen, Adams sent a few demo recordings to A&M Records and was signed to them, by the age of 18, for one dollar. He has written and released fourteen albums since then. Some of the first demos written in 1978 have surfaced over the years; most notably "I'm Ready" (recorded for both the album Cuts Like a Knife and later his release for MTV Unplugged) and "Remember", which went on his first album. Both songs were covered by other artists before his first album was even released.

This time was also the start of a long songwriting partnership between Adams and co-writer Jim Vallance, which led to the first solo album, Bryan Adams, released in 1980. His second album, You Want It You Got It (1981), contained the FM radio hit "Lonely Nights", but it wasn't until his third album, Cuts Like a Knife, that he broke through with four hits in 1983, most notably with the title track. He quickly followed up that album with Reckless at the end of 1984, which produced six Top 40 songs and has since been certified five times platinum in the US. Next came Into the Fire in 1987, which was also certified platinum. This was the last album completely written by Adams and Vallance, but many of the fragments of their other songs ended up on the forthcoming block buster Waking up the Neighbours .

Live!Live!Live! is the complete recording of the 3 July 1988 concert in Werchter, Belgium, which was broadcast by the CBC in Canada and on MTV around the world. One of his most successful albums is 1991's Waking up the Neighbours (see 1991 in music), which was produced by Robert John "Mutt" Lange and Adams, and featured the single "Everything I Do (I Do It for You)". This album and the song went to number one everywhere in the world in 1991 and 1992, with the song spending a record-breaking sixteen weeks at number one on the charts in the United Kingdom. The next album was the hits collection So Far So Good lead by the single "Please Forgive Me", a slow rock ballad.

The next four years saw Adams releasing an album each year, with 18 til I Die summer 1996, Bryan Adams MTV Unplugged winter 1997, On a Day Like Today autumn 1998, and The Best of Me worldwide in 1999 and in the U.S. in early 2002. In May 2002, he released the Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron DreamWorks soundtrack, which went gold in the U.S.

Room Service was released on 20 September 2004, in Canada and in Europe; "Open Road" was its first single. The album was released in the U.S. on 10 May 2005, on Mercury Nashville. Anthology is a two disc set, released in 2005 as a retrospective collection of hits and some more obscure tracks from the 25 years of recording. No one has been able to verify how many millions of albums he has sold during his career.

Social activist

In 1985, Adams co-wrote the Canadian benefit record for Ethiopia called Tears Are Not Enough. In that same year, he took part in the U.S. side of the Live Aid concert in Philadelphia. He was a featured member of Amnesty International's 1986 A Conspiracy of Hope Tour and was in London to play at the Nelson Mandela birthday party concert at Wembley Stadium in 1988.

In 1990, he joined many other guests (including Michael Kamen) for Roger Waters' massive performance of The Wall in Berlin, Germany. In 1992, Adams protested against Canadian Content regulations, which were changed as a result. He successfully campaigned for the Southern Antarctic Whale Sanctuary in the mid-1990s with Greenpeace Chairman David McTaggert. (The two distributed over 500,000 postcards at concerts around the world encouraging politicians to vote yes for the creation of the sanctuary.) On his 1998 album On a Day Like Today, he supports the Elephant Sanctuary, Hohenwald in Tennessee and Elefriends in England. Adams also supports breast cancer research through donations from his photography (see below).

Adams performed in Amman, Jordan in February 2004 where he enjoys a broad base of fans. His Arab fans were happy to meet him live, and were even happier when they heard he wasn't a supporter of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, during an interview with a local T.V. channel.

On 29 January 2005, Adams joined the CBC benefit concert from Toronto for victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.

On 2 July 2005, Adams performed at Live 8's Canadian performance in Barrie, Ontario.

On 25 May 2005, Adams and cousin Johnny Armitage raised £1.3M from a concert and auction entitled Rock by the River for the Royal Marsden Hospital in London.

On 15 November 2005, Adams played in Qatar and raised an astonishing £1.5M ($2,617,000) through a performance and the auction of a guitar he had purposely signed by many of the worlds most prominent guitarists. The money went to Qatar's "Reach Out to Asia" campaign to help the underprivileged across the continent, and to his own projects of rebuilding a school in Thailand and building a new sports center in Sri Lanka, both of which had been devastated by the tsunami.

On 29 January 2006, he was the first western artist to perform in Karachi, Pakistan, in conjunction with a benefit concert to raise money for underprivileged children to go to school; some of the proceeds of that concert also went to victims of the 2005 earthquake.

On 15th May 2006, he attended the Hope Foundation's London event (hosted by designer Bella Freud) helping to raise a portion of the £250,000 pounds for support of Palestinian Refugee Children.

On 15th May 2006, Adams was made an Ambassador to the Prince's Trust, an honarary appointment made by Prince Charles Charity in London to raise awareness for young people looking for work.

In June 2006, at three different charity auctions in London, England, Adams offered individuals from the public the chance to bid to sing with him live in concert. Over £50,000.00 was raised with money going to the NSPCC (The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children), Children in Need (an annual British charity appeal organized by the BBC) and the UCLH.

As a photographer

Adams has had his photographs published in British Vogue, Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, Jane and Interview, among others. His other photographic efforts are publishing 'Zoo Magazine', the fashion/art magazine based in Berlin, Germany. On 1 June 2005, he published his first book of photos in the United States with Calvin Klein called American Women; proceeds from this book go to breast cancer research for programs at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He released a similar book of photos called Made in Canada in December 1999 and a year later followed it up with an exhibtion for the Haven trust. All of this work was in tribute to a friend of his, Donna, who died of breast cancer.

In 2004, Adams was invited, along with other photographers from the Commonwealth, to photograph Queen Elizabeth II during her Golden Jubilee; one of his photographs was used as a Canadian postage stamp in 2004 and again in 2005 (see Queen Elizabeth II definitive stamp (Canada)).

On the 15 March 2006, Adams was presented with the gold award for his photo editorial on actor Mickey Rourke at the German Lead Awards in Hamburg, Germany.

Photographic Exhibitions include:

Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto 1999
The McCord Museum, Montreal 2000
Saatchi Gallery, London 2000
Photokina, Köln (Cologne), Germany 2001
ICA, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London 2004
Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto 2004
Calvin Klein, NYC, Dallas, Paris 2005
Canada House, Trafalgar Square, London 2005/2006
Il Tempio Di Adriano, Rome, Italy, July, 2006
Photokina, Köln (Cologne), Germany, September, 2006
Leica Gallery, Vienna, Austria, November, 2006
Art Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia, November, 2006

Personal life

Adams speaks French and has lived in France.
He currently lives in England and supports Chelsea F.C.
Adams is a vegan.
Dated Danish Actress/Model Cecilie Thomsen (who appeared in 007 James Bond - Tomorrow Never Dies.

Discography

Filmography

Pink Cadillac (1989) film by Clint Eastwood: Adams played a gas station attendant.
House of Fools [1] (2002), film in Russian by Andrei Konchalovsky: Adams plays a hallucination of himself.

References

External links

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