Tina Arena

Australian child television performer Tina Arena stepped into a towering legacy to rank among her nation’s most commercially successful female vocalists ever. Long before her recording triumphs, however, she appeared as eight-year-old Tiny Tina Arena on the Australian program Young Talent Time. After auditioning successfully and claiming the weekly prize multiple times in succession, she earned a permanent spot on the cast. Seven years afterward she remained with the series, navigating the challenge of dividing her teenage years between intense public scrutiny in front of the cameras and relative anonymity once she turned fifteen, all while beginning to sing in nightclubs, cut occasional tracks, and voice advertising jingles.

By 1989, at age twenty-one, Tina Arena prepared her return to the spotlight. She issued her debut album Strong as Steel, whose single “I Need Your Body” ranked among the year’s biggest Australian hits. In 1991 she devoted extended periods in Los Angeles to sharpening her songwriting and joined an Australian production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat as the narrator.

Her second major release, Don’t Ask, propelled her to international recognition. Once the single “Chains” topped the Australian chart, it climbed into the British Top Ten and the American Top 40. Certified eight times platinum at home, the album eventually surpassed two million copies sold worldwide. For her third album In Deep she collaborated with producer Mick Jones of Foreigner and included a version of the band’s “I Want to Know What Love Is.” Capitalizing on that success, Arena moved into theater as Esmeralda in a U.K. staging of Notre Dame de Paris and, in 2000, performed “The Flame” at the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony. Her fourth studio set Just Me appeared in 2001; although it did not replicate prior global numbers, it still earned gold certification in both Australia and France. She ventured into dance music by contributing vocals to the Roc Project’s 2003 U.S. chart-topper “Never (Past Tense),” then issued Greatest Hits 1994–2004 the next year.

Late in 2005 Arena unveiled Un Autre Univers, her first entirely French-language album, which reached number nine on the French chart and attained platinum status after seventy-eight weeks inside the Top 200. Two years later, following the expiration of her recording contract, she financed Songs of Love & Loss herself before securing a new arrangement with EMI Australia. As its title implied, the collection centered on love songs, among them interpretations of material by Dusty Springfield and Diana Ross. In 2008 she toured Australia alongside Italian crossover artist Andrea Bocelli and released Songs of Love & Loss, Vol. 2, captured live in London with an orchestra led by Simon Hale. A live CD/DVD package titled The Onstage Collection, taped at the Melbourne Arts Centre during her 2009 Love & Loss tour and featuring duets with Kane Alexander, surfaced in 2010.

Arena rejoined Young Talent Time as a judge in 2012, the same series that had launched her career, and by year’s end she had finished an Australian tour accompanied by various symphony orchestras. The performances yielded the live album Symphony of Life, recorded in Melbourne and issued that November. Reset, her first studio project in five years and her first collection of original English-language songs in more than a decade, arrived in October 2013. The record earned another platinum certification, while her recurring appearances on TV’s Dancing with the Stars kept her visibility high across Australia. Her autobiography Now I Can Dance, titled after a late-’90s hit single, was published to coincide with the album. Eleven, tracked in Australia, France, Sweden, and England, followed in October 2015. The next month she was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame, with Kylie Minogue delivering the introduction. In 2017 she released the career-spanning collection Greatest Hits & Interpretations.