Pinkan Mambo

While still in senior high school, she found a job as a café singer and performed in numerous venues throughout Jakarta.

[1][2] Life with her grandmother was strict and, as Mambo felt depressed without her father, she became withdrawn, sticking to a daily routine of prayers and studying.

While in elementary school she began singing along with songs by her favourite singers Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston in her bedroom.

She changed venues often, telling the entertainment magazine Tabloid Nova that within a year she had sung at almost every café in the city.

[3] In 1999 Maia Estianty and her husband Ahmad Dhani established a musical duo consisting of a singer and musician, based on concepts pioneered by international bands such as Roxette and Savage Garden.

[3] After three years of training, during which time Mambo joined Dhani's band Dewa 19 as a backing singer,[4] Ratu released its first album, Bersama (Together), in 2003.

She moved away from her on-stage overly feminine persona, her previous "girly" look and her known affection for the colour pink, and marketed herself as a sexy, sensual singer.

[13][14] Mambo acted in the 2010 film Selimut Berdarah (The Bloody Blanket), playing a young woman who unknowingly sends her younger sister to an organ harvesting ring.

[7] Mambo does not write her own songs; rather she uses the works of numerous Indonesian songwriters, including Melly Goeslaw and Glenn Fredly.

[20] Mambo's 2004 pregnancy led to her cancelling her wedding to Meiza Reza Tobroni,[21] as the father of her unborn child was another man.

[2][22] Mambo who at that time still embraced the religion of Islam, gave birth to a boy, Alfa Rezel, on 28 January 2005.

[24] The relationship, however, fell through, and in 2013 Mambo who has converted to Evangelist with her two children married Steve Wantania, a music-video maker in the United States.