Fergie

Under the Texas sun in 2007, Robert Rodriguez drenched Stacy Ferguson in gallons of bloody syrup and latex entrails on the set of Planet Terror. She played Tammy, a fugitive whom a horde of infected people tore apart along a back road. Most stars with multimillion-dollar record deals would have run from a B-movie set reeking of burnt gunpowder. She didn't.

Mud always suited her.

Her relationship with the camera goes back a long way. In 1984, she voiced Sally Brown in two Peanuts specials and joined the cast of Kids Incorporated. She spent six straight seasons singing in front of the Disney Channel spotlight while earning perfect grades at school.

But adolescence changed the script. She formed the vocal pop trio Wild Orchid in 1991, signed with RCA and tasted the rewards of commercial tours. When the label canceled the release of her third album in 2001, a severe methamphetamine addiction and paranoid delusions left her broke. She had to take refuge in a church in her neighborhood to quit the drug cold turkey.

Arena Tours and the Call of Hollywood

In 2002, will.i.am called her to the studio to record backing vocals on a secondary track. A couple of takes were all it took for her to become the lead vocalist of The Black Eyed Peas. The album Elephunk sold more than nine million copies worldwide and turned an alternative hip-hop group into a industrial machine of danceable pop.

While the group was dominating the radio charts, Fergie released her solo debut, The Dutchess, in 2006. It sent three number-one hits on the U.S. charts and sold eight million physical copies.

Nobody saw that bombshell coming.

Wolfgang Petersen used that commercial buzz to cast her in the blockbuster Poseidon in 2006. Her role as the ship's singer lasted only five minutes before the water shattered the windows of the main lounge, but it was enough for casting directors at the major studios to start taking notes on her.

Fellini's Arena and the Price of Television

Rob Marshall cast her in 2009 for the musical Nine, a Broadway adaptation inspired by the world of Federico Fellini's 8½. She shared the stage with Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard and Nicole Kidman. Fergie played Saraghina, a prostitute who initiates the lead character into the mysteries of adulthood by the sea.

Her energetic musical number about the arena kicking tambourines earned her a Screen Actors Guild nomination along with the rest of the cast. Critics tore apart the film's final cut, but praised her vocal performance as the one thing that survived the overall wreck.

Commercial animation also came knocking. She lent her raspy voice to Gloria the hippo in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa in 2008, and two years later she voiced Jezebel in the dog comedy Marmaduke.

In 2017, she released her second solo album, Double Dutchess, structured as a visual feature film of thirteen linked music videos titled Double Dutchess: Seeing Double. She financed the project with money from her own bank account after splitting from the major label Interscope.

But live television doesn't forgive miscalculations. During the NBA All-Star Game in 2018, she performed the national anthem with a slowed-down tempo and jazz cadences that set off open laughter among the players on the bench. The video surpassed eleven million views in 24 hours, and radio stations pulled her songs from their rotations.