Vanity, Prince protege, dies aged 57 | Music

The singer, who gave up music and embraced religion, had suffered health problems since her crack addiction in the 80s Vanity, the artist who was a protege of Prince in the early 80s, has died at the age of 57. Vanity, whose real name was Denise Matthews, had suffered kidney failure and abdominal illness, according

Music This article is more than 7 years old

Vanity, Prince protege, dies aged 57

This article is more than 7 years old

The singer, who gave up music and embraced religion, had suffered health problems since her crack addiction in the 80s

Vanity, the artist who was a protege of Prince in the early 80s, has died at the age of 57. Vanity, whose real name was Denise Matthews, had suffered kidney failure and abdominal illness, according to TMZ.

Her death was confirmed in a tweet from her friend Sheila E, Prince’s drummer in the 80s.

SADDEN my FRIEND IN CHRIST gone 2day. Vanity, Denise Matthews. MISS YOU DEARLY. U ARE IN HIS ARMS NOW, NO Pain pic.twitter.com/UbCWtl8brc

— SheilaEdrummer (@SheilaEdrummer) February 16, 2016

Matthews was a model when she met Prince in 1980. He suggested she call herself Vagina, but she – wisely – took the stage name Vanity instead. She appeared on his 1982 album 1999 before launching a career fronting the trio Vanity 6, best known for their hit single Nasty Girl, also from 1982.

Unsurprisingly, given Prince was her mentor, her image was highly sexualised – photo shoots often featured her and her bandmates in lingerie – and was condemned by the conservative pressure group Parents Music Resource Center. She embraced her image, though. “I’ve had a mailman call me on the pay phone in a restaurant and tell me he wants me,” she told People magazine in 1984. “What’s the big deal?”

She had been slated to appear in the film Purple Rain, but left the the cast when her relationship with Prince fractured in 1984, though she did act in other films.

Matthews became addicted to crack in the late 80s. In his memoir The Heroin Diaries, her then lover Nikki Sixx – of Mötley Crüe – writes about taking the drug with her.

In her memoir Blame It on Vanity, she wrote: “I’d inhaled enough rock so that by the age of 35, you could light me up, smoke me and stick me in the nearest cold grave. Easily, the devil had won me and readied my tired body for hell.”

After a crack overdose in 1994, she suffered renal failure and became a born-again Christian, shedding the Vanity persona. She required dialysis five times a day, and suffered vision and hearing loss.

Matthews set up a ministry in California and renounced her previous life. “I don’t have a television,” she told her hometown paper, the Niagrara Falls Review, in 2007. “I haven’t seen a tape of mine in 15 years. I get calls from people saying ‘Your movie’s on!’ That’s nice, but I don’t have a television. My tapes as Vanity … I destroyed those years ago.”

Late last year, Matthews launched a GoFundMe campaign to pay her medical costs, asking for $50,000, but raising less than $7,000. She said she had been diagnosed with encapsulating peritonitis, which causes intestinal blockage.

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