Madonna (b. August 16, 1958)
At the age of 49, Madonna grabbed headlines away from her fellow Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees by using her acceptance speech to reveal she took ecstasy and smoked grass on her way to the top. The admissions came on March 10, 2008 at New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel.
After accepting her award from Justin Timberlake, Madonna said, "The night I met Michael Rosenblatt, who signed me to Sire Records, I jammed my demo tape into his hand, we both did a tab of ecstasy and then we danced the night away." She then recalled the night she met long-term publicist Liz Rosenberg, saying: "We smoked a joint together."
Madonna turns on a suburban spa salesman in the 1985 movie Desperately Seeking Susan (pictured), which launched her dance hit, “Into the Groove.” After smoking, the philandering, money-grubbing jerk muses, "What's it all about? There's more to life than making money....All time comes from a single point in the universe."
On a March 31, 1994 edition of The Late Show with David Letterman, she asked Dave whether he had ever smoked "Endo" (meaning, presumably, marijuana grown in Mendocino county, California). In 2009 she said to Dave about her high-jinks that night (when she also used the f-word 13 times), "I think it may have had something to do with the joint I smoked before I came on."
According to Guinness World Records, Madonna is the world’s most successful female musician and the top earning female singer in the world with an estimated net worth of over $325 million. Her 2006 Confessions tour holds the record for the highest-grossing concert tour by a female artist. In 2008, she surpassed Elvis Presley as the artist with most top ten hits in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 charts, with thirty-seven top ten singles.