Barry Manilow

Smooth crooner Barry Manilow is best known for hits like "Mandy," "I Write the Songs," "Looks Like We Made It," and the tropical pop-disco smash "Copacabana." Though he is often derided by critics, it is estimated thought that he has sold around 75 million records in his four-decade career.

Born 1943 in Brooklyn, singer-songwriter and producer Barry Manilow spent his late teens performing on the local circuit. He studied at the New York College of Music and Julliard. While working at CBS to pay his way through college, he met director Bo Herrod who gave him his first break, as a result of which he ended up writing the score for The Drunkard. He turned his musical talents to jingle writing, including adverts for KFC, Pepsi, and McDonald's among his list of credits. After a spell as musical arranger for The Ed Sullivan Show he teamed up with Bette Midler for the first of many collaborations.

His own first album Barry Manilow was not a big commercial success, but the follow-up, Barry Manilow II, which included the single "Mandy," went to #1 and took his name worldwide.

The 1978 film Foul Play used the track "Copacabana" from the album Even Now, which proved so popular that it was used again as the basis of a TV musical and a stage musical which ran for two years on London's West End.

He was introduced to younger fans through American Idol where a Manilow-esque contender, Clay Aiken, received his seal of approval.

He has been involved with a number of philanthropic ventures, including funding a scholarship at the UCLA, raising money for the American Red Cross in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and doing a benefit concert for the Hurricane Hugo-hit Charleston, South Carolina, after which the Mayor declared a Barry Manilow Day.

He released his greatest hits album, Ultimate Manilow, in 2002. In 2004, he became the in-house performer at the Las Vegas Hilton with a contract signed until 2008. During this period he also released an extremely popular series of CDs featuring popular music from decades of the 20th century, beginning with "The Greatest Songs of the Fifties," and concluding with the 1980s. For his 1970s installment, he included a few re-interpreted, mostly acoustic arrangements of his own biggest hits from the period, He received very rare, nearly unanimous approval for these tracks from the critics who usually granted him faint praise.