Michael Jackson

Michael Joseph Jackson began performing before he could fully comprehend stardom and never truly escaped its gravity. As a child with the Jackson 5 and as a solo artist, he produced some of the most commercially successful and artistically ambitious popular music of the twentieth century. Thriller remains the best-selling album in history. His choreography — particularly the moonwalk — entered the global visual vocabulary. His life was a study in the price exacted by fame claimed too young.