Marie Osmond built an extensive career across entertainment, authoring, philanthropy, and television hosting while emerging from a show-business clan long associated with clean-cut family fare. Though she never joined her siblings’ official singing ensemble, the performer scored a breakthrough in 1973 when her country-pop rendition of “Paper Roses” climbed to the top of the Billboard Country Chart. Between 1976 and 1979 she shared hosting duties with brother Donny on their weekly variety series Donny & Marie, and her screen credits stretch across film and television in various formats. Her recorded output proved similarly substantial, yielding several chart-dominant LPs during the 1970s—Paper Roses, In My Little Corner of the World, and Who’s Sorry Now—followed decades later by Music Is Medicine in 2016 and Unexpected in 2021.
Olive Marie Osmond entered the world in Ogden, Utah, in 1959 and grew up in a devout Mormon household that included eight brothers. Her earliest television appearance occurred at age three, when the oldest Osmond brothers performed on The Andy Williams Show. After serving as variety-program regulars throughout the 1960s, the group achieved pop stardom in 1970; management soon urged Marie to step in front of the microphone as well. She joined her brothers for select live dates—still without becoming an official member of the Osmonds—and cut her debut single, the country number “Paper Roses,” in 1973. The track earned gold certification, became the first debut single by a female artist to reach number one on the country chart, and reached the pop Top Five. Its parent album also led the country rankings; Osmond issued two further MGM releases and additional singles that failed to duplicate that initial impact.
In 1976 she and Donny launched their own weekly variety hour, Donny & Marie, which continued until 1979. During the same period she explored acting, notably declining the lead in Grease over objections to the script’s content, while securing modest roles in television films and providing voices for several animated children’s series. Returning to country music in the mid-1980s, she signed with Curb and immediately topped the chart with the Dan Seals duet “Meet Me in Montana.” Her next solo single, “There’s No Stopping Your Heart,” also reached number one, and 1986 brought two more strong entries: the solo Top Five “Read My Lips” and the number-one Paul Davis collaboration “You’re Still New to Me.” Later singles met with diminishing chart returns, though “I Only Wanted You” nearly cracked the country Top Ten in 1987; her final appearance on the chart arrived in 1990 with “Like a Hurricane.”
Much of the 1990s found Osmond performing in touring stage musicals. She reentered television in 1998 as co-host of the daytime talk program Donny & Marie, which lasted two seasons. Early in the following decade she appeared as a judge on Celebrity Duets and competed on Dancing with the Stars. In 2007 she issued the holiday collection Magic of Christmas, her first studio album in nearly twenty years, then followed it in 2010 with I Can Do This, a set of spirituals and hymns. She has also published self-help volumes, one of which addressed her experience with postpartum depression. Music Is Medicine, her tenth studio album, appeared in 2016 and included contributions from Olivia Newton-John, Sisqo, John Rich, and Alex Boye. In 2021 she released Unexpected, an album of standards and show tunes recorded with the Prague Symphony Orchestra.
