Whitney Houston – music icon, best-selling artist, winner of six Grammy awards, movie star and admitted drug addict – died Feb. 11 at age 48.

She was found unresponsive at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, California, hours before she was to attend a Grammy party hosted by music producer Clive Davis.

Born in Newark, NJ, into a musical family, Houston was the daughter of Cissy Houston, a gospel singer, and cousin of Dionne Warwick (with Aretha Franklin as her godmother).

In the 1980s, she started performing with her mom in New York City nightclubs, where she was spotted by Davis, who produced her debut, Whitney Houston in 1985.

How Will I Know, Saving All My Love, The Greatest Love of All: The songs became the soundtrack to the 1980s, selling millions.

Her follow-ups also went No. 1, with the 1992 soundtrack to her film The Bodyguard topping the US charts for months. Its single, I Will Always Love You, was the best-selling single by a female artist ever.

Over her lifetime, Houston sold some 55 million records.

But in the 1990s, her career, and life, went downhill.

In 1992, she married Bobby Brown, a R&B singer. They divorced in 1997, but not before years of domestic abuse calls and doing drugs together.

Houston began admitting her problems with marijuana and cocaine (not crack; “Crack is whack,” she said memorably) in television interviews.

“The biggest devil is me,” she told TV interviewer Diane Sawyer in 2002, with Brown next to her.

“I’m either my best friend or worst enemy.”

She is survived by their daughter, 19-year-old Bobbi Kristina Houston Brown.