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Age: 23, Profession: Soul singer and pianist

Alicia Keys' 2001 debut album Songs in A Minor, sold 10 million copies and won five Grammys. Not a bad start to her recording career. But she did not always have such success.

Keys, the daughter of a white mother and a black father, was raised in a deprived part of Hell's Kitchen, New York, by her mother, after her father left home when she was two years old. Her mother, a paralegal and actress, worked hard to support her daughter.

Even though her mother was unable to afford any more than a one-room apartment, with Alicia sleeping on the couch, by 13 years old the future megastar was taking piano, dancing and singing lessons.

'I saw a woman handling herself in a bad situation,' Keys has said. The efforts of her and her mother paid off and she won a scholarship to study performing arts at New York's Columbia University.

Now she has released another album, The Diary of Alicia Keys, she is compared with the great soul singer Aretha Franklin and Keys makes use of her classical piano training by starting her shows with performances of Tchaikovsky.

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