Icelandic singer, songwriter, composer, record producer, and actress noted for her distinct three-octave vocal range and eccentric persona. She has developed an eclectic musical style over her four-decade career that has drawn on electronic, pop, experimental, trip hop, classical, and avant-garde music.
Björk has received sixteen Grammy nominations. Her role in the 2000 Lars von Trier film Dancer in the Dark with Catherine Deneuve, won her the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival.
Björk has always been a musician and claims that she thinks in music rather than words or pictures. Elfin, strange, quirky, unique, her voice is soaring and piercing; unearthly. She was a famous singer in Iceland by the age of 13, and in her late teens to early 20s she formed a band. Singing in English, she became famous in the English-speaking world with their first album in early 1987. She soon was on her way to being a multi-millionaire with record sales.
Björk is 1.63 m (5 ft 4 in), which is small for a Scandinavian woman, and has nearly black hair, also unusual; a strange brand of beauty. Her millions of fans tend to be a bit quirky themselves, into technology and alternative ways of looking at the universe, including astrology.
Along with musical talent, she is noted for her temper that once led her into beating up a photographer. During the mid-80s she moved to London, England, where she lived for about a decade before getting homesick and returning to Iceland, where she actually owns her own island.
Her first band, the Sugarcubes, had a hit with their first album but their next two were less and less popular. She ditched the band (which at one point included her son’s father) in 1992 and went solo because she wanted to do electronic music (techno, the stuff people play at raves, music created partially on computers) and they did not.
She came to prominence with albums such as Debut (1993), Post (1995), and Homogenic (1997), collaborating with a range of artists and exploring a variety of multimedia projects. Her other albums include Vespertine (2001), Medúlla (2004), Volta (2007), Biophilia (2011), Vulnicura (2015), Utopia (2017) and Fossora (2022). She works with extremely unique video directors and fashion designers to create her look; one of her videos features two robots making love.
Björk has more “credibility,” respect for her artistic talents, from reviewers and fans than almost anybody else working today–she’s considered the creative artist of the pop world. Madonna pursued her in a desperate attempt to do a duet together, but Bjork refused, consenting only to write a song and letting Madonna record it without her.
Björk was a guest artist at the Hollywood Academy Award ceremonies on 25 March 2001, performing a song of hers nominated for an Oscar with a band and a 55 piece orchestra. She gained as much press coverage for the odd costume she wore, that of a swan draped over her body.
When forming the Sugarcubes, Björk had a brief marriage with guitarist Þór Eldon. They had a son, Sindri Eldon Þórsson, born 8 June 1986, the same day that the band was formed. They had divorced before the end of 1986, but continued to work together in the band.
In the late 1990s, Björk lived in New York, where she met artist Matthew Barney in the art scene. The pair formed a relationship and started living together, moving to Brooklyn Heights in 2000. Their daughter Isadora Barney was born in 2002. Barney and Björk initially kept their work separate, but then collaborated on Barney’s art film Drawing Restraint 9, a long-term project released in 2005; Björk acted in the film and also contributed musical elements. The couple broke up in 2013.
Björk has told Rolling Stone that she likely falls on the autism spectrum.
Link to Wikipedia biography