'''Paula Julie Abdul''' (born June 19, 1962) is an American dancer, choreographer, singer, and television personality.
In the 1980s, her career rose rapidly, from being a cheerleader for the Los Angeles Lakers to being a sought-after choreographer at the height of the music video era, then to being a pop music singer with a string of top hits in the late 1980s and early 1990s. After that she suffered a series of reverses in her professional and personal life, until she found renewed fame and success in the 2000s as a judge on the highly rated television series ''
American Idol''.
Abdul is 5'1" (according to a Tyra Banks interview) in height. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000716/bio
Biography
Early life
Abdul was born in San Fernando, California. Her mother, Lorraine Rykiss, is a Canadian former concert pianist, and was born in Saint Boniface, a French-speaking area of Winnipeg; she once worked as an assistant to film director Billy Wilder. Her father, Harry Abdul, is a Syrian-Brazilian orphan who was born to parents of Sephardic Jewish descent; he was once a livestock trader and now owns a sand and gravel business in California. When Abdul was 7, her parents divorced. She and her sister, Wendy (seven years older), lived with their mother in the San Fernando Valley.
Although actually of Sephardic (through her father) and Ashkenazi (through her mother) Jewish descent, Abdul bears an Arabic surname and is sometimes thought by the public to be of African-American or mixed-race descent. Her Brazilian ancestry sometimes qualified her as Latino though the media had mistaken her ethnic origin on many occasions. In an Ebony Magazine interview she said: "I'm Syrian-Brazilian-Canadian-American. I've had a lot of Black kids come up to me and say, 'You are Black! There's no way, no way you are not Black', and that's all right with me."
As a small child Abdul's interest in a career as a performer was inspired by Gene Kelly in the classic film ''Singin' in the Rain'' as well as such entertainers as Debbie Allen, Gregory Hines, Sammy Davis Jr., Fred Astaire, and Bob Fosse. In an interview in the May 1990 ''Ebony'' magazine, she says, when asked about black influence, "Absolutely....As a young kid growing up, I admired the talent of so many Black artists. Black kids identified with me because we all danced together, and we shared that love for art. My favorite artists were Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, the O'Jays—that's what I grew up on. That was my consciousness."
Abdul began dance lessons around the age of eight and showed a natural talent for it. She attended
