This time she's managing her own career and so far has dates booked through the summer. But Branigan blames bad management for her decline in popularity. The taste for grunge in the early '90s nearly derailed her career. A chance meeting with manager Sid Bernstein on her return led to her first recording contract. "For the first time," she says, "I felt I could really express myself." After graduating, she scored a gig as a backup singer for Leonard Cohen's 1977 European tour. In her senior year she landed the lead in the high school musical. When her parents - James, a mutual-funds broker (who died in 1984) and Kathleen, now retired - separated, Branigan turned even more inward. Growing up in Brewster, New York, "I was real shy," says Branigan, the fourth of five children. "The things I wore onstage!" gasps Branigan (at an Atlanta nightclub in '84). She still has rods and pins in both legs, but she's back in the studio, recording an album she hopes to release this summer - and more confident of her talents than ever. But a freak accident in June of that year - she broke both femurs when she fell 10 feet from a ladder while hanging wisteria outside her three-bedroom lakeside home in Westchester County, New York - landed her in physical therapy for six months. In early 2001 she finally went back to the studio. "It's something you never really get over," she says, "but you put it in a place inside you and deal with it in the way you have to." Close friend Vicki DePasquale, 52, says, "A piece of her died with Larry."įor the next five years Branigan did the occasional concert to supplement her royalty income but mostly spent time alone or with close friends, slowly coming to terms with her grief. Branigan put him on herbal treatments they began spending more time at a beach cottage in the Hamptons, and Kruteck survived for another two and a half years. After surgery and chemotherapy, he was given two months to live - a prognosis Branigan refused to accept. Then, in 1994, doctors found a grapefruit-size tumor in Kruteck's colon. They married nine months later and, when she wasn't touring, hunkered down at their New York City apartment. As a 24-year-old in 1981, when she met Kruteck at a Manhattan party, Branigan was on the way up.īut Kruteck, a lawyer 20 years her senior, was "not at all threatened" by her career, she says. While the new single may not stir the same kind of fervor "Gloria" did, Branigan sees her comeback attempt as an emergence from years of mourning. But now Branigan is dipping her toe back into the pop scene with a dance remake of ABBA's "The Winner Takes It All," a single that Billboard Magazine editor Chuck Taylor calls a "satisfying high-energy thumper." "It was not even a choice." Paralyzing grief kept her away from a music career for years.
Laura branigan feet for free#
Want more from PEOPLE.COM? Sign up for free e-mails
0 kommentar(er)
