Abdul, Paula

Paula Julie Abdul (born June 19, 1962) is an American dancer, choreographer, singer, and television personality. more...

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 sympathetic judge on the highly rated television series American Idol.

Early life

Abdul was born in San Fernando, California. Her mother, Lorraine Rykiss, is a Jewish 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 commonly thought by the public to be of African-American or mixed-race descent. In an Ebony Magazine interview she says: "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 ,' and that's all right with me".

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