Awww, this is so sad. Vanity, real name Denise Matthews passed away from kidney failure today at a hospital in Fremont California where had been living for the last couple of decades. She was just 57 yrs old. Vanity rose to fame in the early 1980s as the lead singer of the Group Vanity6, a group that legendary singer Prince put together. She only made 1 album with Vanity6 from which they had several hits, but the dance number "Nasty Girl" was their biggest. It went to #1 on the Billboard dance charts. After Vanity disbanded Vanity6 she signed a solo contract with Mowtown Records and put out 2 solo albums, "Wild Animal" and "Skin to Skin". However, none of her songs ever garnered her the fame nor chart topping success that she had with Vanity6. So she turned to acting and she made quite a few movies, like Motown's "The Last Dragon", "Action Jackson", "52 Pick-up", "Southbeach" and "Deadly Illusion" to name a few.
In 1986, she was cast opposite John Stamos in Never Too Young to Die, a disastrous send-up of James Bond movies that featured KISS’ Gene Simmons as a cross-dressing villain.
“She was pretty wild,” Stamos recently told THR [3]about his co-star. “She was like Al Pacino in Scarface, blasting these f—ing [prop] machine guns all over the place. We weren’t even rolling!”
Matthews’ reputation as a hard partier in those early years of fame was both widely known and well-founded. As she cycled through rocker boyfriends (Billy Idol, Adam Ant and Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx, among them), she developed a dangerous addiction to crack cocaine.
In 1994, that addiction led to near-fatal renal failure. She later said that Jesus Christ appeared to her at that time and offered her a second chance at life if she abandoned her Vanity persona.
Matthews spent the years since sober and a born again Christian. After a kidney transplant in 1997, she became a Christian evangelist. She told her story in a self-published 2010 autobiography, Blame It on Vanity.
Matthews’ health woes took a turn for the worse late last year, however, and she set up a crowdfunding effort [4] to pay for her medical treatment after being diagnosed with sclerosis encapsulating peritonitis, a severely painful kidney condition. She raised $6,599 of the $50,000 she had sought. Now that is just messed up, people can go on Crowdfunding and raise money to buy Beyonce tickets and recoup funds lost buying lottery tickets but no one wants to help someone pay for medical procedures. What kind of country do we live in people?
Rest in peace, Denise. So sad.
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