Born: 1 April 1961, United Kingdom
Died: NA
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Scottish singer Susan Boyle stunned audiences in the U.K. and beyond in 2009 when she competed on the television show Britain’s Got Talent. Born in 1961 and growing up in a small industrial town, Boyle was bullied due to what she would later discover was autism but was, in the 1960s, assumed to be brain damage. She was drawn to singing from a young age, performing at church, karaoke, and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. She was well-known locally but failed to get any traction with her demo tape and was unsuccessful when she auditioned for another televised talent show, My Kind of People, in 1995. Her sister’s and mother’s deaths in 2000 and 2007 also made it difficult for Boyle to continue pushing for the kind of recognition her talent and dedication warranted.
But it was in honor of her mother, who had loved the show and had encouraged her to try out for it, that Boyle applied for Britain’s Got Talent in late 2008. While she didn’t have the look of the show’s typical female contestants, her rendition of Les Misérables’s “I Dreamed a Dream” silenced any skeptics and earned a standing ovation. Videos of her performances on the show were viewed online by an estimated 100 million people around the world and she placed second overall. Her first studio album, I Dreamed a Dream, debuted at number one on the Billboard charts that November, and became the year’s second best-selling album, with more than 3.1 million copies sold. She went on to release several more albums: The Gift (2010), Someone to Watch over Me (2011), Standing Ovation: The Greatest Songs from the Stage (2012), Hope (2014), A Wonderful World (2016), and Ten (2019). A stage musical based on her life, I Dreamed a Dream, toured the U.K. in 2012 and her autobiography, The Woman I Was Born to Be, was published in 2010. Her work would garner more than 25 million albums sold, as well as more than 250 million audio streams and more than 650 million YouTube hits.