![]() By summer of 1975, her weight had plummeted to 91 pounds, and she checked into Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre, which would be her first of many stays in the hospital.įor the next eight years, her weight would fluctuate, but she remained focused on her music. ![]() The Carpenters had to cancel their 1975 European tour because she was too weak to perform. Their first hit was a reworking of The Beatles song “Ticket to Ride” and was followed by a re-recorded version of Kurt Bacharach’s “Close To You,” which went on to sell over 1 million copies.īefore long, Karen Carpenter’s anorexia began to impact her music. This marked their rise to fame, but also the beginning of Karen Carpenter’s anorexia. In 1970, they were signed to A&M Records as The Carpenters. ![]() Finally, in 1969, they began making music as a duo and shopped around several demo music tapes to different record companies. Additionally, Karen and Richard Carpenter formed another band, Spectrum, with four fellow students at California State University at Long Beach that played several gigs before disbanding. With her on drums, her older brother Richard Carpenter on the piano and their friend Wes Jacobs on the bass and tuba, the trio won a battle of the bands at The Hollywood Bowl in 1966. 4, 1983.īorn on March 2, 1950, in New Haven, Connecticut, Karen Carpenter moved with her family to Downey, California in 1963. However, stardom came at a steep price as she struggled with body image issues and eating disorders which caused her premature death on Feb. Playing the drums as one half of The Carpenters and possessing what Paul McCartney called “the best female voice in the world,” Karen Carpenter’s smooth, melodic voice and heartfelt lyrics made The Carpenters one of the most successful groups of the early 1970s. From the outside, Karen Carpenter looked like a rockstar. After her death, however, other public figures shared their own struggles with anorexia and bulimia, most notably Princess Diana.This year marks the 40th anniversary of Karen Carpenter’s death at the age of 32, a result of complications from anorexia nervosa. (The other moral of the film, noted critic Richard Zoglin: “such an illness can often be traced to the failings of Mom and Dad.”)Ĭarpenter was the first celebrity casualty of an eating disorder, according to Randy Schmidt, the author of Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter. For a generation of women who saw Twiggy as an icon of the ideal body shape, it also proved- as TIME concluded in 1989, when summing up the moral of a docudrama about Carpenter’s life-that it was, in fact, possible to be too thin. In her TIME obituary, the magazine called her the “dulcet-voiced singing half, opposite her pianist-arranger brother Richard, of the squeaky-clean Carpenters.” By that point, the duo-having released their first album in 1969-had sold 80 million records and won three Grammy Awards for hits like “Close to You,” “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Rainy Days and Mondays.”Ĭarpenter’s death raised awareness of the dangers of eating disorders, which had until then been little publicized or understood. 4, in 1983, of heart failure related to her years-long struggle with anorexia. ![]() The lead singer of The Carpenters, the Grammy-winning band she’d formed with her brother, died on this day, Feb. ![]() in the mid-1970s, that they realized her health was in jeopardy. It was only after her weight continued to plummet, dropping to a skeletal 90 lbs. When she slimmed down from 145 to 120 lbs., her friends and family praised her weight loss. After being called chubby as a teenager, Karen Carpenter began dieting. ![]()
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