Linda Ronstadt: who is the rock icon that will soon be played by Selena Gomez in cinemas?

Her name may mean nothing to you, but she is one of the most popular American singers of the 1970s and 1980s. Linda Ronstadt, the hippie icon with half-rock, half-country ballads, is re-emerging on the art scene thanks to a new biopic project dedicated to him. And it is Selena Gomez, another music legend who has been cast in his shoes. The promise of a grandiose and perhaps unforgettable musical film.

Linda Ronstadt, Queen of Rock

Born in 1946 in Tuscon, Arizona, Linda Maria Ronstadt grew up in a Mexican-American family with four children. His father passed on his taste for music, he ran a hardware store during the day and sang in bars at night. Later she devoted herself to him Songs of my father, which is none other than the best-selling non-English album in United States history. The title is also borrowed from a book of traditional Mexican songs given to Linda by her aunt the year she was born. “All women in the family learned to play the piano and knew opera arias”she confided Linda Ronstadt On Vogue American, about his education. The poetry of music never left her again.

Although it seemed that the study was not for her, the young woman very quickly became aware of her vocal abilities, at 18 she left school and moved to the avant-garde neighborhood of Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles. There she met various artists, joined forces with some of them and began to compose her own universe. In the mid-1960s, she became famous with a folk group Stone ponies (the title track “Different Drum” significantly climbed to #13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and remains one of the most famous he’s ever recorded Linda Ronstadt) before leaving independently. His first success was undoubtedly the song “Long Long Time” released in 1970, although his biggest hits remained “Heart Like a Wheel” (1974), which topped the headlines Led Zeppelin like D’Elton John on the pop charts of the current year, “Simple Dreams” (1977) and “Living in the USA” (1979). The singer gave her last live performance in 2009. She retired from the stage after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which she has been talking about publicly since 2012.

A few years later, in 2019, a documentary produced by the tandem Rob Epstein AND Jeffrey Friedman shows life and career Linda Ronstadt on the screen. Addressed Linda Ronstadt: The sound of my voice, the film traces his magnificent trajectory, spanning nearly five decades, whose versatility has taken audiences from rock to country to jazz and operetta. In total, the star recorded as many as 29 studio albums, won eleven Grammys and collaborated with the greatest voices of her time: she sang with Neil YoungTHE Rolling stones, Philip Glass, Dolly Parton or Johnny Cashwith whom she participated in a famous concert at the Tennessee State Prison in Nashville in 1974. The fact is: Linda Ronstadt is a superstar. The first to fill stadiums. The first to have five platinum albums in a row. A phenomenon that Hollywood is not ready to forget: the musician has the right to her own star on the coveted Walk of Fame.