Shania Twain

Born Eilleen Regina Edwards in Windsor, Ontario, and raised poor in Timmins, singing in bars after closing time from the age of eight because the family needed the money. She took the surname of her adoptive stepfather, Jerry Twain, and later renamed herself Shania — "I'm on my way" in his Ojibwa language — right as she signed with Mercury Nashville in 1991. When she was twenty-one, both her parents died in a car accident, and she put her career on hold to raise her four younger siblings. Her debut album went nowhere. Her second, The Woman in Me, made with producer and then-husband Robert John "Mutt" Lange, changed everything.

Come On Over, released in 1997, became the best-selling studio album by a woman in any genre and the best-selling country album of all time — roughly 40 million copies, spinning off hits including You're Still the One, From This Moment On and Man! I Feel Like a Woman!. Twain has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, making her the best-selling female artist in country music history. She and Lange divorced in 2010, and she later married Frédéric Thiébaud — the former husband of the woman Lange had the affair with, which is either the strangest footnote in country music or the only fair ending available. She is an Officer of the Order of Canada and was the first non-American ever named Entertainer of the Year by the Academy of Country Music.