Marilyn Manson (born January 5, 1969 as Brian Hugh Warner), is an American musician and artist known for his controversial stage persona and image as the lead singer of the eponymous band. His stage name was formed from the names of actress Marilyn Monroe and convicted murderer Charles Manson. His long legacy as being depicted in the media as a bad influence on children, along with his seemingly outrageous styles for which he models, and the controversy surrounding his lyrics all have led to his more pronounced public appeal.
Marilyn Manson was born as Brian Hugh Warner in Canton, Ohio, the only child of Barb Wyer and Hugh Jack Warner. His father was a Roman Catholic and his mother was an Episcopalian. According to his autobiography The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, Manson is of German and Polish descent on his father's side. He was raised in his mother's religion. Warner attended Heritage Christian School from first grade to tenth grade. He later transferred to Cardinal Gibbons High School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Manson graduated from high school in 1987, and became a student at Broward Community College in 1990. He was working towards a degree in journalism, and was gaining experience in the field by writing music articles for a South Florida lifestyle magazine, 25th Parallel. He would soon meet several of the musicians to whom his own band would later be compared, including My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.
Manson formed Marilyn Manson & the Spooky Kids in Florida in 1989 (the name was shortened to Marilyn Manson in 1992). While with The Spooky Kids, he was involved with Jeordie White (also known as Twiggy Ramirez) and Stephen Gregory Bier Jr. (also known as Madonna Wayne Gacy) in two side-projects: Satan on Fire, a faux-Christian metal ensemble where he played bass guitar, and drums in Mrs. Scabtree, a collaborative band formed with White and then girlfriend Jessicka (vocalist with the band Jack Off Jill) as a way to combat contractual agreements that prohibited Marilyn Manson from playing in certain clubs. In the summer of 1993, the band drew the attention of Trent Reznor. Reznor produced their 1994 debut album, Portrait of an American Family and released it on his Nothing Records label. The band began to develop a cult following, which grew larger with the release of Smells Like Children in 1995. That EP yielded the band's first big MTV hit with "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)", a cover of the 1983 Eurythmics hit. Antichrist Superstar (co-produced by Trent Reznor) was an even greater success.
In the US alone, three of the band's albums have been awarded platinum certification, three more gold, and the band has had three releases debut in the top ten, including two number-one albums. Manson first worked as a producer with the band Jack Off Jill. He helped name the band and produce most of the band's early recordings, and also played guitar on the song "My Cat" and had the band open most of his South Florida shows. Manson later wrote the liner notes to the band's album Humid Teenage Mediocrity 1992-1995, a collection of early Jack Off Jill recordings. Manson has appeared as a guest performer on DMX's album Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood and on Godhead's 2000 Years of Human Error album — the only album released on his vanity label Posthuman.
Manson made his film debut in 1997, as an actor in David Lynch's Lost Highway. Since then he has appeared in a variety of minor roles and cameos, including Party Monster; then-girlfriend Rose McGowan's 1998 film Jawbreaker; Asia Argento's 2004 film The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things; Rise; and The Hire: Beat The Devil, the sixth installment in the BMW Films series. He was interviewed in Michael Moore's political documentary Bowling for Columbine discussing possible motivations for the Columbine massacre and allegations that his music was somehow a factor. He has appeared in animated form in Clone High and participated in several episodes of the MTV series Celebrity Deathmatch, becoming the show's unofficial champion and mascot; he often performed the voice for his claymated puppet, and contributed the song "Astonishing Panorama of the Endtimes" to the soundtrack album. In July 2005, Manson told Rolling Stone that he was shifting his focus from music to filmmaking - "I just don't think the world is worth putting music into right now. I no longer want to make art that other people — particularly record companies — are turning into a product. I just want to make art."
Johnny Depp reportedly used Manson as his inspiration for his performance as Willy Wonka in the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Manson himself expressed interest in playing the role of Willy Wonka in the film.
He is currently working on his directorial debut, Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll, In the film, he plays Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Rather than a web-only release, he decided to give the estimated $4.2 million budget film a conventional cinema release, originally slated for mid-2007. The film will have an original music soundtrack with previously unreleased songs. Production of the film has been postponed until an undefined period following the Eat Me, Drink Me tour.
Art
Manson claimed in a 2004 interview with i-D magazine to have begun his career as a watercolor painter in 1999 when he made five-minute concept pieces and sold them to drug dealers. On September 13-14, 2002, his first show, The Golden Age of Grotesque, was held at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions Centre. Art in America's Max Henry likened them to the works of a "psychiatric patient given materials to use as therapy" and said his work would never be taken seriously in a fine-art context, writing that the value was "in their celebrity, not the work". On September 14-15, 2004, Manson held a second exhibition on the first night in Paris and the second in Berlin. The show was named ‘Trismegistus’ which was also the title of the center piece of the exhibit – a large, three-headed Christ painted onto an antique wood panel from a portable embalmers table.
Manson named his self-proclaimed art movement Celebritarian Corporation. He has coined a slogan for the movement: “We will sell our shadow to those who stand within it.” In 2005 he said that the Celebritarian Corporation has been "incubating for seven years" which if correct would indicate that Celebritarian Corporation, in some form, started in 1998.
Celebritarian Corporation is also the namesake of an art gallery owned by Manson, called the Celebritarian Corporation Gallery of Fine Art in Los Angeles for which his third exhibition was the inaugural show. From April 2-17, 2007, his recent works were on show at the Space 39 Modern & Contemporary in Florida. 40 pieces from this show traveled to Germany's Gallery Brigitte Schenk in Cologne to be publicly exhibited from June 28 - July 28, 2007. Manson was refused admittance to Kölner Dom (Cologne Cathedral), when he was in the city to attend the opening night. This was, according to Manson, due to his makeup. « hide
Show all 22 related performers...
Show only the first 7 related performers...
