Cyndi Lauper

Ozone Park in Queens produced a singer with a four-octave range and a wardrobe assembled out of thrift shops, and for about a decade the wardrobe got the attention. She's So Unusual arrived in 1983 and made Cyndi Lauper a pop star almost immediately, and the Grammy for best new artist followed. True Colors in 1986 was the harder, sadder record, and its title song has outlived nearly everything else on radio from that year.

The voice is the argument. Lauper sings with a scratch and a catch in it that reads as untrained and is not, and she can move from a novelty hook to something close to torch singing inside a single verse. That range is also why the later career went where it did: she holds a Grammy for a musical theatre album and a Primetime Emmy for a comedy guest performance, an unusual pair of trophies for a singer once dubbed the queen of quirky pop.

Acting has always run alongside. She played Sylvia Pickel in the 1988 psychic caper Vibes and Geena Briganti in Life with Mikey, she played Marianne Lugasso on Mad About You, and she turned up as the psychic Avalon Harmonia on Bones, which suits her better than any of the film roles because it lets her be funny and slightly unsettling at once. She also appears as herself throughout the documentary record, from We Are the World onward.

She has sold more than fifty million records, and she has spent much of her public life campaigning for LGBTQ rights in the United States.