Alicia Augello Cook was born in Harlem on January 25, 1981 to African-American father Craig Cook and Italian-American mother Terri Augello. Augello raised Alicia, who from a very young age showed extreme musical promise. She began playing classical piano at age seven and began writing songs at age 11. Cook also earned one notable acting role at age five, co-starred in a 1985 episode of The Cosby Show as Rudy’s friend Maria in the episode “Slumber Party.” As a teen Alicia enrolled at the Professional Performance Arts School, where she honed her vocal and performance skills, and graduated at the age of 16 as the class valedictorian.

After graduation, two prestigious Columbias made offers to the talented young vocalist: Columbia University and Columbia Records. After attempting both, Alicia was stretching herself too thin, and decided to focus on her music career. Alicia’s manager suggested the stage name Alicia Keys after a dream he’d had, and Keys quickly adopted the name before signing with Jermaine Dupre’s So So Def label, a subsidiary of Columbia. After a failed and never-released song for the Men in Black soundtrack, Keys’s contract with Columbia ended, and she was picked up by Clive Davis’s Arista record label shortly after.

In 2001 Keys released her debut album, Songs in A Minor, on Davis’s J Records, redefining the term “overnight stardom” with more than 50,000 albums sold in the first day, and more than 230,000 in the first week. Her hit single “Fallin” propelled Keys to the national stage and earned her five Grammy awards that year, including the coveted Best New Artist, Best R&B Album, and Song of the Year titles.

Keys has followed up her debut smash with several successful projects, including several praised television and film appearances. In the early 2000s Keys made television cameos on both Charmed and American Dreams, and lent her voice to an episode of the popular cartoon Backyardigans. Keys made her big-screen debut in Smokin’ Aces (2007), a crime film with a high-profile cast including Ben Affleck, Ray Liotta, Common, and Ryan Reynolds. Keys’s co-stars and audiences praised her natural acting ability, which she later displayed the same year in The Nanny Diaries opposite Scarlet Johansson.

Since having her natural acting talents discovered by critics, casting directors, and audiences alike, Keys has continued to pursue television and film opportunities alongside her ever-successful music releases. Keys released The Diary of Alicia Keys in 2004 and Unplugged in 2005, the sales for which made her the first female R&B artist to have three consecutive #1 debuts on the Billboard 200 in as many releases. In 2008, Keys starred in the film adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd’s acclaimed The Secret Life of Bees opposite Queen Latifah and will lend both her musical and acting talents to play 1940s biracial piano child prodigy Philippa Schuyler in Composition in Black and White. Keys is also rumored to be in discussions with the CW Network to produce a series surrounding her early life as a biracial child in Harlem, in the same vein as the network’s Everybody Hates Chris.

Keys released her third studio album, As I Am, in 2007, selling more than 740,000 copies in its first week alone, setting her largest sales record to date and tying her with Britney Spears for the most consecutive number-one debuts by a female artist on the Billboard 200.