As the story goes, Aaliyah began performing at age of 11. She'd started on-stage with singing with Gladys Knight's troupe in Las Vegas.
"Liyah," as she was nicknamed, graduated from the Detroit High School for the Fine and Performing Arts in June of 1997. By her 18th birthday, Aaliyah had already put out 2 hit LPs and has established herself as an r&b force to reckon with.
As a child, Aaliyah performed on Star Search and couple of TV pilots. When she reached her early teens, her uncle Barry Hankerson (Gladys Knight's ex-husband), introduced her to a performer he was managing at the time. That performer was R. Kelly. The meeting resulted in R. Kelly producing Aaliyah's debut cd, "Age Ain't Nothing But A Number".
The two were rumored to have been married when the singer was only 15-years-old, but their respective record labels denied those allegations. A deeper look from certain television stations provided a marriage certificate and annulment papers. The mystery around that marriage still surfaces today.
On Aaliyah's second LP, released in '96, R. Kelly's production skills were absent. But even without the Aaliyah/R. Kelly union, her "One In A Million" LP contiuned to push Aaliyah to stardom.
Her reputation for being sassy, as well as her street-wise sounds and videos got her noticed by fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger. Aaliyah's face (and fashionably clad body) was all over the magazines, on billboards and TV commericals worldwide sporting comfortable clothing and signature shades.
She got some flack over the shades. People were wondering: why the shades all the time? She started wearing them at the beginning of her career, when she was supershy and trying to get over her fear of the camera. "I've matured, but I want to stay true to my style", she says.
While working the "One in a Million" cd, Aaliyah starred in her first feature film "Romeo Must Die". She played Trish O'Day, the object of Jet Li's affection, in the amped-up modern day retelling of "Romeo and Juliet".
After the success of "Romeo Must Die," Aaliyah's film career continued to gather momentum. Prior to her untimely death on August 25, 2001, Aaliyah had signed on to appear in a pair of sequels to the 1999 box office smash "The Matrix." The role has since gone to Mohammad Ali's daughter, Lela.
But she also had a role in the movie "The Queen of the Damned" � in which she singer starred as a 6,000 year-old vampire named Akasha - that movie rolled out a few months after her death and stayed a number one for quite a while..
Her brother Rashad did some voiceover work on some of Aaliyah's dialogue in the movie because her untimely death came before the movie was completed. Rashad speaks in the same tone as Aaliyah, so he was brought in to re-record a number of small words and stray lines of Aaliyah's.
Aaliyah's final cd was appropriately named "Aaliyah". She stuck with the things that worked best for her in her last albums, and that meant working with rapper-producer Timbaland, Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott, Ginuwine and Playa. The "Aaliyah" album was her first since her 1996 double-platinum effort, "One in a Million."
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