Vanity

Websites:  No
Origin: Niagara Falls, Ontario, 🇨🇦 - Fremont, California, USA
Biography:

Denise Katrina Matthews

Born: 4th January, 1959
Died: 15th February 2016

Denise Matthews was born in Niagara Falls, Canada. After years of modelling, beauty pageants and acting (as D.D. Winters) she met Prince who encouraged her to become a singer for his new girl group Vanity 6 which became replaced in 1984 with Apollonia/Apollonia 6. As a solo artist, Vanity signed to Motown and was a minor successful and starred in a number of movies. In early 1992, she became a born-again Christian renounced her stage name Vanity and reverted to Denise. In 1994, Matthews was hospitalized for near-fatal kidney failure from a drug overdose. The marriage with football player Anthony Smith lasted just one year. After a kidney transplant in 1997, she dedicated the rest of her life full-time to Christ. She made speaking engagements at churches across the United States and worldwide. In 2010, she released her autobiography, Blame It On Vanity: Hollywood, Hell and Heaven. Denise Matthews died in Fremont, California on February 15, 2016, at the age of 57, due to kidney failure.

Denise Matthews, Pop Singer Known as Vanity, Dies at 57
Eli Rosenberg, NY Times, Feb. 16, 2016
Denise Matthews, the singer, model and actress known as Vanity, who toured with Prince in the 1980s before eschewing her wild persona for life as a minister, died on Monday in Fremont, Calif. She was 57.

Ms. Matthews’s sister Renay Matthews confirmed the death. She said Ms. Matthews had checked into a hospital on Saturday night after years of health problems related to her kidneys.

Ms. Matthews met Prince at the American Music Awards in 1980, and the two soon became romantically involved. He also invited her to be a part of Vanity 6, the funky, erotically charged girl group that had a hit in 1982 with “Nasty Girl” and toured with Prince. She appeared on the cover of Rollling Stone with Prince, in a portrait shot by Richard Avedon, with her hands creeping down the front of his pants.

Ms. Matthews was supposed to play the lead female role in “Purple Rain,” the semi-autobiographical Prince film that was a box-office hit in 1984, but abandoned the project before filming began. She went on to release two albums as a solo artist on Motown, “Wild Animal” and “Skin on Skin.”

She thrived on raciness, often performing in lingerie. “My music is very sexual, so you could say I’m just putting all of me out there,” she told The Associated Press in 1985. She was on the cover of Playboy in 1988.

As an actress, she appeared on television and in films including “The Last Dragon,” “Never Too Young to Die,” “Action Jackson” and “52 Pick-Up.”

By her own later admission, Ms. Matthews led a fast life, and it took its toll. In an interview with Jet magazine in 1993, she said she had been “extremely wild” in her younger days.

“There was a lot of cocaine,” she said. “I tried men, women, everything. I didn’t snort cocaine, I smoked it.”

She told Jet that her drug use had nearly killed her: She had had renal failure a few years earlier and was told by doctors that she had only three days to live.

After that experience, her life took a religious turn. She left the name Vanity behind and became a Christian evangelist.

“All I had become was thus painted on my face — vanity,” she later wrote on a personal website.

According to her sister, Ms. Matthews eventually became an ordained minister and preached in churches around the country. She published an autobiography in 1999, “Blame It on Vanity.”

Denise Katrina Matthews was born on Jan. 4, 1959, in Niagara Falls, Ontario, the daughter of Helga Senyk and James Levia Matthews. She worked as a model in Canada before moving to the United States.

In addition to her sister Renay, her survivors include two other sisters, Patricia Dalton Matthews, and DeBorah Matthews-Brown, and her mother.

In the mid-1990s, Ms. Matthews was briefly married to the professional football player Anthony Wayne Smith, who was sentenced to life in prison for murder last month.

As news of her death spread on Monday during the Grammy Awards, many musicians expressed their condolences on social media.

“Vanity was everything to me,” wrote the drummer for the Roots, Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove. The rapper MC Hammer said he had been in church with Ms. Matthews on Saturday. “Vanity left church after giving a beautiful testimony,” he wrote.

Onstage in Melbourne, Australia, on Tuesday, Prince offered a tribute of his own. “Her and I used to love each other deeply,” he told the crowd, according to Australian news media accounts. “She loved me for the artist I was; I loved her for the artist she was trying to be.”