Helen Maxine Reddy, better known by her stage name Helen Reddy, was an Australian-born singer, songwriter, actress, television personality, activist, and motivational speaker. She is known for her single “I Am Woman” and is known as the “Queen of ’70s Pop.” She was born into a showbiz family and began her profession as an entertainer when she was four years old. She later relocated to the United States in order to pursue a career in music. Her sound can best be defined as a light mix of rhythm and blues, easy rock, and jazz. In 1968 and 1970, she made her debut with the singles “One Way Ticket” and “I Believe in Music.” The Grammy-winning song “I Am Woman” became not just the hymn of the feminist movement during the tumultuous 1970s, but also Helen Reddy’s hallmark tune. “Angie Baby” and “No Way to Treat a Lady” are two of her biggest successes. She had fifteen singles in the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States. She recorded 18 studio albums, 1 live album, and 15 compilation albums during her career. She earned the award for Favorite Pop/Rock Female Artist at the inaugural American Music Awards in 1974.

She died on September 29, 2020, in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 78.

Helen Reddy Net Worth:

Helen Reddy was a well-known singer who was dubbed the “Queen of ’70s Pop.” In her career, she has released 15 studio albums and has sold over 80 million copies worldwide. Record sales, contracts, concerts, tours, and acting all contribute to her earnings. She has acted in a number of films, television shows, and theater productions. Her estimated net worth is $3 million.

What is Helen Reddy Famous For?

• Famous for her no. 1 single, “I Am Woman”.
• Often referred to as the “Queen of ’70s Pop”.

Where is Helen Reddy From?

Helen Reddy was born on October 25, 1941, in New York City. Helen Maxine Reddy is her given name. Her hometown is Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. She is an Australian citizen. Her race is Caucasian and her ethnicity is mixed. Her ancestors are Irish, Indian, Scottish, and English. Judaism is her faith. Scorpio is her zodiac sign. She was born into a well-known family in the entertainment industry. Stella Lamond (mother) and Maxwell David “Max” Reddy (father) are her parents (father). Her mother was a well-known actress who appeared on the television shows Homicide (1964), Country Town (1971), and Bellbird (1967), while her father worked as a writer, producer, and actor. She has siblings as well. Toni Lamond, her half-sister, and Tony Sheldon, her nephew, are both actors and singers. Thomas Lamond, her Scottish great grandfather, was a former mayor of Waterloo, New South Wales, and was patronized by Hercules Robinson, 1st Baron Rosmead.

In terms of her schooling, she attended Tintern Grammar School. She arrived in New York in 1966 and opted to stay with her 3-year-old daughter Traci in order to pursue a singing career. She enrolled part-time at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1969 to study parapsychology and philosophy.

Helen Reddy Life Story:

• Reddy had started performing with her parents on the Australian vaudeville circuit starting at the age of 4.
• She went to live with her paternal aunt, Helen Reddy at the age of 12. Her parents had been constantly touring nationwide.
• She got married at a young age with Kenneth Claude Weate. Weate was an old musician and a family friend. They had a daughter. They got divorced.
• She started supporting herself as a single mother to her daughter, Traci.
• She had a kidney removed at 17.
• She continued performing: sang on radio and television.
• She won the talent contest on the Australian pop music TV show, Bandstand. As a prize, she received a trip to New York City to cut a single for Mercury Records.
• She landed in New York in the United States with her daughter in 1966.
• However, she failed to get a contract with the record label.
• Despite having only a hundred dollars of money, she decided to remain in the United States to pursue a singing career.
• Due to work permit issues, she found it difficult to find singing jobs. She made trips to Canada which did not require work permits.
• A fellow Australian and entertainer, Martin St. James threw a party for Reddy who also paid her rent. She met her future manager and husband, Jeff Wald at the party. They got married three days after the meeting.
• They struggled to support themselves. Reddy did several jobs to support them.
• The family moved to Chicago, where her husband Wald landed a job as talent coordinator at Mister Kelly’s.
• Reddy started singing in local lounges and landed a recording deal with Fontana Records in 1968.
• She released her first single, “One Way Ticket” from Fontana. It failed to in the American chart but peaked at No. 83 in Australia.
• The family relocated to Los Angeles in the same year. Her husband Wald was hired by Capitol Records. Wald found success after joining the record label.
• Capitol Record agreed to let Helen cut one single. She did ‘I Believe in Music’ penned by Mac Davis b/w ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him’ from Rice and Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar.
• She rose to fame after her single “I Am Woman” which reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1972.
• “I Am Woman” was recorded and released in May 1972 but barely dented the charts in its initial release.
• She won a Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for her hit single, “I Am Woman”.
• Following her first success, she had more than a dozen U.S. Top 40 hits, including two more No. 1 hits which included Kenny Rankin’s “Peaceful” (No. 12), the Alex Harvey country ballad “Delta Dawn” (No. 1), Linda Laurie’s “Leave Me Alone (Ruby Red Dress)” (No. 3), Austin Roberts’ “Keep on Singing” (No. 15), Paul Williams’ “You and Me Against the World” (featuring daughter Traci reciting the spoken bookends) (No. 9), Alan O’Day’s “Angie Baby” (No. 1), Veronique Sanson’s and Patti Dahlstrom’s “Emotion” (No. 22), Harriet Schock’s “Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady” (No. 8), and the Richard Kerr/Will Jennings-penned “Somewhere in the Night” (No. 19; three years later a bigger hit for Barry Manilow) with a time span of five years.
• She then recorded the Beatles song “The Fool on the Hill” for the musical documentary All This and World War II in 1976.
• Within the three years, her successful hits include “Delta Dawn” in 1973 to “I Can’t Hear You No More” in 1976.
• Her 1977 remake of Cilla Black’s 1964 hit “You’re My World” indicated comeback potential, with a No. 18 peak. It’s parent album, “Ear Candy”, which was her 10th album, would become her first album to not attain at least Gold status since her second full-length release, 1972’s “Helen Reddy”.
• Moreover, she also sang as a backup singer on Gene Simmons’s solo album on the song “True Confessions”.
• Among her eight singles, five reached the Easy Listening Top 50-including “Candle on the Water”, from the 1977 Disney film Pete’s Dragon (which starred Reddy).
• She had also ranked at No. 98 on the country chart with “Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler”, the B-side to “The Happy Girls”.
• Her next four Capitol album releases subsequent to Ear Candy failed to chart and she said “I signed [with Capitol] ten years ago…And when you are with a company so long you tend to be taken for granted. For the last three years, I didn’t feel I was getting support from them” in 1981.
• Her debut album for MCA Records was “Play Me Out” which was released in May 1981.
• Her remake of Becky Hobbs’s 1979 country hit “I Can’t Say Goodbye to You” returned her for the last time to the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 88; it also returned Reddy to the charts in the UK and Ireland (her sole previous hit in both was “Angie Baby”).
• MCA released one further Reddy album: “Imagination”, in 1983 which proved to be her final release as a career recording artist which was released just after the finalization of Reddy’s divorce from Wald whose alleged subsequent interference in her career Reddy would blame for the decline of her career profile in the mid-1980s: “Several of my performing contracts were canceled, and one promoter told me he couldn’t book me in case a certain someone ‘came after him with a shotgun'”.
• She then released “Feel So Young” on her own label in the year 1990.
• 1997 saw the release of “Center Stage”, an album of show tunes that Reddy recorded for Varese Sarabande.
• Her final album to date was the 2000 seasonal release “The Best Christmas Ever”.
• She then released a cover of the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” for the album Keep Calm and Salute the Beatles on the Purple Pyramid label in April 2015.
• Besides her singing career, she has also appeared in TV shows such as The Bobby Darin Show, The Carol Burnett Show, and The Muppet Show.
• She also helmed the 1973 summer replacement series for ‘The Flip Wilson Show’.
• In the year 1973, she became the semi-regular host of the NBC late-night variety show “The Midnight Special”, a position she retained until 1975.
• She then starred in “Pete’s Dragon”, introducing the Oscar-nominated song “Candle on the Water”.
• She also made the role of a nun in Airport 1975, singing her own composition “Best Friend”.
• She was one of many musical stars featured in the all-star chorale in the film “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (1978), and has since played cameo roles in the films “Disorderlies” (1987) and “The Perfect Host” (2010).
• She has been an occasional television guest star as an actress, appearing on the series The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, The Jeffersons (as herself), Diagnosis: Murder, and BeastMaster.
• She also had a voice cameo as herself in the Family Guy television show’s Star Wars parody, “Blue Harvest” in the year 2007.
• Not only this but also she played a ‘red’-themed (‘Red’-dy) member of the Red Squadron, alongside Red Five (Chris Griffin), Red Buttons, Redd Foxx, Big Red, Red October, Simply Red, and others.
• She mostly worked in musicals including Anything Goes, Call Me Madam, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and – both on Broadway and the West End – Blood Brothers.
• She then appeared in four productions of the one-woman show “Shirley Valentine”.
• After then, she announced her retirement from performing in 2002, giving her farewell performance with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.
• She was reported to be living “simply and frugally off song royalties, pension funds, and social security…[renting] a 13th-floor apartment with a 180-degree view of Sydney Harbour” as of April 2008.
• In the year 2008, she stated, “It’s not going to happen. I’ve moved on,” and explained that her voice had deepened to a lower key and she wasn’t sure if she would be able to sing some of her hits. She also said she had simply lost interest in performing. “I have very wide-ranging interests,” she said. “So, singing ‘Leave Me Alone’ 43 times per song lost its charm a long time ago.”
• Later, she was interviewed in 2011 by Australian television and said she was very happy to be retired from show business.
• Again, on 12th July 2012, she returned to the musical stage at Croce’s Jazz Bar in San Diego and for a benefit concert for the arts at St. Genevieve High School in Panorama City, a neighborhood of Los Angeles. Reddy also sang a duet (“You’re Just in Love”) with senior choir member Rosalind Smith.
• She also performed many of her best-known songs, including, “Angie Baby,” “You and Me Against the World”, a medley of “Delta Dawn”/”Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady,” and “I Am Woman”.
• She performed two nights at Catalina Supper Club, Los Angeles in April 2013, shortly after her 73rd birthday, and performed two nights at Orleans Hotel Showroom in Las Vegas in January 2015.
• In August 2015, unknown sources revealed that she was diagnosed with dementia and had moved into the Motion Picture and Television Fund’s Samuel Goldwyn Center where she was cared for by family and friends.
• Recently, a biographical film about Reddy titled “I Am Woman” was released in the year 2019, in which Helen Reddy is played by Tilda Cobham-Hervey.

Helen Reddy Albums:

I Don’t Know How to Love Him (1971)

Helen Reddy (1971)

I Am Woman (1972)

Long Hard Climb (1973)

Love Song for Jeffrey (1974)

Free and Easy (1974)

No Way to Treat a Lady (1975)

Music, Music (1976)

Ear Candy (1977)

We’ll Sing in the Sunshine (1978)

Reddy (1979)

Take What You Find (1980)

Play Me Out (1981)

Imagination (1983)

Feel So Young (1990)

Center Stage (1998)

The Best Christmas Ever (2000)

Greatest & Latest (2002)

Awards and Achievements of Helen Reddy:

• “I Am Woman” earned a Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.
• For her part in Airport 1975, Reddy was nominated for a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer-Female.
• She also received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her work in the music industry, located at 1750 Vine Street on 23rd July 1974.
• In the year 1974, at the inaugural American Music Awards, she won the award for Favorite Pop/Rock Female Artist.

Helen Reddy Personal Life:

Helen Reddy has been three times in her life. Kenneth Claude Weate was her first husband. She married Weate when she was barely 20 years old. Weate was a family friend and an older musician. Traci, their daughter, was born to them. After the birth of their daughter, they divorced. In 1968, she married Jeff Wald. At the time, he worked as a secretary at the William Morris Agency. They married just three days after first meeting. Before marrying Wald, she converted to Judaism. Jordan, her son, was born in 1972. In January 1981, the couple divorced. Wald had entered a treatment center to get help for an eight-year cocaine addiction. Although the couple reconciled, Wald’s continuing substance misuse led to their divorce. Jordan’s father and mother agreed to share custody. In 1983, Reddy married for the third time. Milton Ruth, a drummer in her band, was her husband. They didn’t have any kids. In 1995, they divorced.

In her later years, she developed dementia.

Helen Reddy Height:

Helen Reddy, who stood 1.6 meters tall and had blonde hair, was quite attractive. Her eyes are a beautiful shade of blue. Her physique is slender. Her sexual orientation was that of a straight woman.

Quick Facts About Helen Reddy