Adrienne Bailon-Houghton American Singer Born in 1983

Early life

Adrienne Bailon-Houghton was born on 24 October 1983 and grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in New York City. She attended the High School for Health Professions and Human Services. Her early path into music ran through church choir singing and school plays, and she has said that a medical career, specifically obstetrics, was once her plan before music took over.

Her first break came in October 1999, when she sang in a church choir at Madison Square Garden. Ricky Martin picked four singers from the group to perform as backing vocalists for that evening's concert, and she was one of them. Shortly afterwards she became part of the girl group 3LW.

Career

3LW was formed with Kiely Williams and Naturi Naughton and signed to Epic Records. Their self-titled debut album came out in November 2000 and was certified platinum in the United States. Naughton left in 2002, and Bailon and Williams carried on as a duo until a new third member, Jessica Benson, was chosen after auditions. The group's later album plans were repeatedly delayed, and 3LW disbanded in 2007.

While 3LW was still active, Bailon and Williams were cast in the Disney Channel film The Cheetah Girls, which premiered in August 2003. She played Chanel, one of four members of a fictional group, and the film's success led Disney to create a real Cheetah Girls trio with Williams and Sabrina Bryan. She reprised the role in The Cheetah Girls 2 in 2006 and The Cheetah Girls: One World in 2008, and the group disbanded at the end of 2008. In the same period she took a recurring part as Alana in That's So Raven. Her first theatrically released film was Coach Carter in 2005, in which she played Dominique. In 2006 she starred in the MTV film All You've Got.

After the group ended, she signed a solo deal with Columbia Records, though she later separated from Island Def Jam in 2012. In 2009 she hosted the programming block New Afternoons on MTV, and in 2012 she appeared in the reality series Empire Girls: Julissa and Adrienne. Further screen work included the television film Lovestruck: The Musical in 2013 and the film I'm in Love with a Church Girl, released in October 2013.

Her best-known television role in later years was as a co-host of the daytime talk show The Real, which premiered in July 2013 and which she co-hosted until 2022. She was the first Latina host of a daytime talk show in the United States. In 2014 she hosted the Oxygen competition series Nail'd It!, and in 2017 she released her first solo album, New Tradiciones, a Christmas record with songs in English and Spanish. In 2018 she launched a jewelry line called XIXI, and she also owns a vegan handbag line, La Voûte. In 2019 she competed on the second season of The Masked Singer as the Flamingo and finished third.

In late 2022 she became co-anchor of the revived late-night version of E! News, alongside Justin Sylvester. She announced in October 2023 that she was leaving the role to spend more time with her family and to live on the East Coast. She returned to acting in 2022 by reprising Alana in Raven's Home, and in 2025 she was cast in a stage musical adaptation of Take the Lead, which opened at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey.

Recognition

For her work on The Real, she and her co-hosts won the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Entertainment Talk Show Host in 2018. The show also won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Talk Series in 2018 and 2019. In total, the records list three awards won by her. At the 67th Grammy Awards she shared the award for Best Contemporary Christian Music Album with her husband Israel Houghton and the group New Breed for Coritos Vol. 1, a Spanish-language album.

Personal life

Bailon-Houghton married the singer Israel Houghton in Paris on 11 November 2016, after announcing their engagement that August. She is also a Christian and has spoken publicly about the role faith has played in her life.