Gloria Estefan
By All Music Guide
By All Music Guide
With 1985s Primitive Love, Miami Sound Machine recorded their first English-language effort, scoring three Top Ten pop hits in the U.S. alone with the infectious Conga, Bad Boy, and Words Get in the Way. For 1988s triple-platinum Let It Loose, the group was billed as Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine, reeling off four Top Ten hits -- Rhythm Is Gonna Get You, Cant Stay Away from You, the chart-topping Anything for You, and 1-2-3. 1989s Cuts Both Ways was credited to Estefan alone and generated her second number one hit, Dont Wanna Lose You; however, while touring in support of the album, on March 20, 1990, her bus was struck by a tractor trailer. She suffered a broken vertebrae that required extensive surgery and kept her off the road for over a year. Emilio Estefan and the couples son were injured in the crash as well, but all three recovered. Estefan resurfaced in 1991 with Into the Light, again topping the charts with Coming Out of the Dark, a single inspired by her near-fatal accident; two more cuts from the album, Cant Forget You and Live for Loving You, secured her foothold on the adult contemporary charts.
With 1993s Mi Tierra, Estefan returned to her roots, recording her first Spanish-language record in close to a decade and earning a Grammy Award for Best Tropical Latin Album; on the follow-up, 1994s covers collection Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me, she also recalled her dance-pop origins with a rendition of the Vicki Sue Robinson disco classic Turn the Beat Around. Another all-Spanish effort, Abriendo Puertas, earned the Grammy as well, while Destiny featured Reach, named the official theme of the 1996 Summer Olympics. As Latin pop made new commercial headway thanks to the efforts of acts like Ricky Martin and Enrique Iglesias, Estefan reigned as the most successful crossover artist in Latin music history, with international record sales close to the 50 million mark. In 1999, she also made her feature film debut alongside Meryl Streep in Music of the Heart, recording the films title song as a duet with *NSYNC and scoring both a massive pop hit and an Oscar nomination in the process. A new Spanish-language album, Alma Caribeña, followed in the spring of 2000. Several months later, Estefan was awarded a Grammy for Best Music Video for No Me Dehes de Querer at the first annual Latin Grammy Awards. Her husband, Emilio, won for Producer of the Year.
