Singer, Actress and Diva Whitney Houston died on Saturday, she was only 48-year-old.

The singers publicist Kristen Foster announced that Whitney died but did not provide a cause of death or the location of her death.

During the 1980s and 1990′s Whitney Houston was one of the most noticeably and best selling musical artists in the world, however her marriage to singer Bobby Brown led Houston down a dark path of drug and alcohol abuse that destroyed her voice and according to recent reports wiped out her fortune that was estimated at one points to be in the hundreds of millions.

When not singing Houston appears in several films including the surprise hit The Bodyguard and Waiting to Exhale. 

Among singers who have claimed Houston as their inspiration are Mariah Carey and Christina Aguilera.

In the last decade sales of Houston albums have plummeted and her bizarre public appearances and awful vocal performance showed an actress on the brink of disaster.

In a 2002 interview with ABC’s Diana Sawyer Houston was quoted:

“The biggest devil is me. I’m either my best friend or my worst enemy.”

During her career Whitney Houston sold over 55 million records in the United States alone, including her 1985 classic Whitney Houston which sold millions of albums and delivered her first Grammy with Saving All My Love for You. That album also led to the hit singles, ”How Will I Know,” ”You Give Good Love” and “The Greatest Love of All.”

Whitney followed up that album with the multiplatinum selling album Whitney which included her massive hits I Wanna Dance With Somebody and Where Do Broken Hearts Go. 

As the New York times wrote of Houston she

“Possesses one of her generation’s most powerful gospel-trained voices, but she eschews many of the churchier mannerisms of her forerunners. She uses ornamental gospel phrasing only sparingly, and instead of projecting an earthy, tearful vulnerability, communicates cool self-assurance and strength, building pop ballads to majestic, sustained peaks of intensity.”

In 2010 after two stints in rehab Whitney declared herself drug free but later in the year she missed several concerts, was stopped at an airport for drug possession and suffered several very public meltdowns.

While she may have fallen from grace in the last decade Whitney Houston will surely be missed by millions of fans and by her daughter Bobbi Kristina who Houston had with Bobby Brown during their 1992-2007 marriage.