Billie Holiday (𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 April 7, 1915, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died July 17, 1959, New York City, New York) was an American jazz singer, one of the greatest from the 1930s to the ’50s.

How accurate is The United States vs. Billie Holiday?Learn about how the life of the real Billie Holiday compares with how it is depicted in the movie The United States vs. Billie Holiday.See all videos for this article

Holiday’s dramatic intensity rendered the most banal lyric profound. Among the songs identified with her were “Strange Fruit,” “Fine and Mellow,” “The Man I Love,” “Billie’s Blues,” “God Bless the Child,” and “I Wished on the Moon.” The vintage years of Holiday’s professional and private liaison with Young were marked by some of the best recordings of the interplay between a vocal line and an instrumental obbligato. In 1956 she wrote an autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues (with William Dufty), that was made into a motion picture starring Diana Ross in 1972. Holiday’s health began to fail because of drug and alcohol abuse, and she died in 1959.