Melissa Etheridge
Two-time Grammy winner Etheridge added another statuette this year—an Oscar for her original song “I Need to Wake Up,” the theme for Al Gore’s anti-global warming film An Inconvenient Truth. The 46-year-old breast cancer survivor also welcomed home two new members to her growing family in October when her wife Tammy Lynn Michaels gave birth to twins Miller Steven and Johnnie Rose. In 2005, still bald from her chemotheraphy treatments, Etheridge performed at the Grammy Awards, a first for a cancer patient still in treatment. Of her survival song, “I Run for Life,” she has said, “I wanted to make it personal, climb into people’s personal emotions and portray a woman who has had breast cancer but is out of it.” Etheridge’s best-selling memoir, The Truth Is…My Life in Love and Music, was re-published this year. –MW
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