Christina María Aguilera (born December 18, 1980) is an American pop singer-songwriter. She began working in the entertainment industry at a relatively young age and rose to popularity through the critical and commercial success of her debut major-label album Christina Aguilera (1999), which produced four hit singles. Her second studio album Stripped (2002) continued the momentum, selling strongly, but it received less favorable reviews and criticism over Aguilera's overtly sexual image. In 2005 she married record executive Jordan Bratman, and her third studio album Back to Basics was released in August 2006.

Early life and career

Aguilera was born in Staten Island, New York to Fausto Wagner Xavier Aguilera, a U.S. Army sergeant, and Shelly Loraine Fidler. Aguilera's father was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador while her mother has German, French, English, Irish and Dutch ancestry. Aguilera's parents met while Fausto was serving at Earnest Harmon Air Force Base in Stephenville, Newfoundland and Labrador. They were both Catholics. Her parents married when her mother was 20 years old and her father was almost 32. Aguilera lived with her father and mother until she was 6 or 7 years old, when her parents divorced and her mother took her and her younger sister Rachel to her grandmother's home in Rochester, Pennsylvania, a blue-collar suburb of Pittsburgh. According to Aguilera and Fidler, her father was very controlling, as well as physically and emotionally abusive. Since then, Fidler has married a paramedic named Jim Kearns, and has changed her name to Shelly Kearns.