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After a brief stint with her sister Lucy Simon as duo group the Simon Sisters, she found great success as a solo artist with her 1971 self-titled debut album Carly Simon, which won her the Grammy Award for Best New Artist, and spawned her first Top 10 single "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be". Learn Carly Simon's 50 facts.
1. Carly Simon was born in New York City.
2. Her father was Richard L. Simon a pianist.
3. Her father often played Chopin and Beethoven at home.
4. Her mother was Andrea Louise Simon, a civil rights activist.
5. Her mother was also a singer.
6. Her father was from a German Jewish family.
7. Her mother was of Swiss German and Spanish-Catholic descent.
8. Simon began stuttering severely when she was eight years old. A psychiatrist tried unsuccessfully to cure her stuttering. Instead, Simon turned to singing and songwriting. "I felt so strangulated talking that I did the natural thing, which is to write songs, because I could sing without stammering, as all stammerers can."
9. Simon was raised in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, New York City.
10. She has two older sisters, Joanna and Lucy, and a younger brother, Peter.
11. She was raised as nominal Catholics, according to a book of photography Peter published in the late 1990s.
12. She attended Riverdale Country School.
13. She also briefly attended Sarah Lawrence College and joined Alpha Gamma Delta.
14. She dropped out of college to pursue music.
15. Her full name is Carly Elisabeth Simon.
16. She is also a children's author.
17. She first rose to fame in the 1970s with a string of hit records; her 13 Top 40 U.S. hits include "Anticipation" (No. 13), "You Belong To Me" (No. 6), "Coming Around Again" (No. 18), and her four Gold certified singles "Jesse" (No. 11), "Mockingbird" (No. 5), a duet with James Taylor, "You're So Vain" (No. 1), and "Nobody Does It Better" (No. 2) from the 1977 James Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me.
18. After a brief stint with her sister Lucy Simon as duo group the Simon Sisters, she found great success as a solo artist with her 1971 self-titled debut album Carly Simon, which won her the Grammy Award for Best New Artist, and spawned her first Top 10 single "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be".
19. Simon achieved international fame with her breakthrough album No Secrets which sat firmly at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for 5 weeks, and spawned the worldwide hit "You're So Vain", for which she received three Grammy nominations, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year.
20. Over the course of her career, Simon has amassed 24 Billboard Hot 100 charting singles, 28 Billboard Adult Contemporary charting singles, and has won two Grammy Awards.
21. AllMusic called Simon, "One of the quintessential singer/songwriters of the '70s".
22. Simon has a contralto vocal range.
23. For her 1988 hit "Let the River Run", from the film Working Girl, Simon became the first artist in history to win a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Golden Globe Award for a song composed and written, as well as performed, entirely by a single artist.
24. She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994.
25. She was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame for "You're So Vain" in 2004.
26. She was awarded the ASCAP Founders Award in 2012.
27. In 1995 and 1998, respectively, Simon received the Boston Music Awards Lifetime Achievement and a Berklee College of Music Honorary Doctor of Music Degree.
28. Simon is the former wife of another notable singer-songwriter, James Taylor.
29. Simon and Taylor have two children together, Sarah "Sally" Maria Taylor and Benjamin "Ben" Simon Taylor.
30. Both of Simon and Taylor's children are also musicians.
31. Besides music, Simon has also appeared in films, such as the 1971 Miloš Forman film Taking Off, in which she played an auditioning singer.
32. Other film appearances (as herself) include the 1985 film Perfect, and an uncredited appearance in the 2004 film Little Black Book.
33. On television, she appeared (also as herself) in a 1989 episode of Thirtysomething, and was a guest-caller named Marie on a 1995 episode of Frasier entitled "Roz in the Doghouse".
34. She also appeared in a 2013 episode of Family Guy entitled Total Recall, and on a 2014 episode of Bob's Burgers entitled "Work Hard or Die Trying, Girl". Simon sang the outro song.
35. Simon married fellow singer-songwriter James Taylor on November 3, 1972.
36. Simon and Taylor divorced in 1983.
37. In 1972-73 Simon scored the biggest success of her career with "You're So Vain". It hit No. 1 on the U.S. Pop and Adult Contemporary charts, and sold over a million copies in the United States alone. It was one of the decade's biggest hits and propelled Simon's breakthrough album No Secrets to No. 1 on the U.S. album charts, where it stayed for five consecutive weeks.
38. No Secrets achieved Gold status that year, but by the album's 25th anniversary in 1997, the album had been certified Platinum.
39. "You're So Vain" received Grammy Award nominations for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female.
40. Additionally, in 2008, it was listed at No. 72 on the Billboard Hot 100's list of the top 100 songs from the chart's first 50 years, August 1958 through July 2008.
41. On October 4, 2007, Simon became a grandmother, when her daughter Sally gave birth to a son, Bodhi Taylor Bragonier.
42. Prior to her marriage to Taylor, Simon was briefly engaged to William Donaldson in the 1960s.
43. Donaldson described her as "the answer to any sane man's prayers; funny, quick, erotic, extravagantly talented."
44. She also was engaged to musician Russ Kunkel, from 1985 to 1986.
45. Simon married James Hart, a writer, poet and businessman, on December 23, 1987. The couple divorced in 2007.
46. Simon underwent a mastectomy, chemotherapy and reconstructive surgery for breast cancer during 1997 and 1998. There had been a lump in her breast for several years before then, but her doctors had advised her against surgery. Simon later recounted: "Then one doctor said, 'You know what, I'd rather see it in a jar than in your breast.'"
47. She also said that she felt "a little angry with myself" over the fact that she did not insist on taking it out sooner.
48. Simon's surgery came at the same time as the death of her long-time friend Linda McCartney, who had also struggled with breast cancer. Simon described McCartney's death as having emotionally "crushed" her.
49. Simon has been close friends with James Taylor's younger brother Livingston Taylor for over forty years. Livingston has said, "I love Carly and Carly loves me. She's a ferocious advocate and supporter of my music."
50. Simon and Livingston Taylor have worked as a musical duo for some songs such as "Best of Friends", released in Livingston's 2006 album There You Are Again, and others earlier in their careers.
