When Amy Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning on July 23, 2011, the music world lost one of its most promising young talents. She had already demonstrated her natural brilliance on her landmark, Grammy-winning album Back to Black in 2006. But in the five years between that release and her untimely death, Winehouse hadn’t shared any new music as she increasingly made headlines for the erratic behavior and legal entanglements fueled by her substance abuse.
Her wrenching downward spiral did little to blunt the shock of Winehouse’s death at age 27. As a dramatized version of her life appears on the silver screen in the biopic Back to Black, here’s what to know about what led to the “Rehab” singer’s demise.
Winehouse pushed boundaries even as a child
Winehouse was always a rebel, bent on doing things her way. In the Oscar-winning documentary Amy, her mother, Janis, admits her daugther was determined and stubborn even as a small child. When her parents split up, Winehouse declared her independence and proceeded to collect tattoos, smoke marijuana, and cut school.
The only future Winehouse saw for herself was as a musician, and she poured her soul into writing deeply confessional lyrics and singing around London, her hometown. She was a unique talent, a jazz fanatic with the voice of a soul singer, and she was quickly signed by Island Records.
Frank, Winehouse’s first album, came out in 2003 when she was only 20 years old. It was an instant hit, rising to No. 3 on the British albums chart, and earned her both awards and financial freedom. The album also hinted at her propensity for drinking and indulging in other vices with the song “Mr. Magic,” the hidden last track of that album, about substance abuse.
But only in the aftermath of Frank’s success did Winehouse truly began the struggle with drugs and alcohol. Her addiction inspired her greatest work and then stole the generational talent who had transcended to worldwide fame.
She thrived in the chaos of her relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil
Suddenly flush with a six-figure advance that was soon followed by much larger paychecks, Winehouse bought her first apartment in London’s Camden neighborhood, long the mecca for punk musicians, drug dealers, and people who enthusiastically consumed both their products. She embraced the local scene with open arms, becoming a regular at its pubs. Her drink of choice was the Rickstasy, unique to the pub The Hawley Arms. It was during this time that she met Blake Fielder-Civil, a charming addict who became the center of Winehouse’s world.
“Amy changed overnight after she met Blake,” her first manager, Nick Godwyn, told The Times in 2007. “She just sounded completely different. Her personality became more distant. And it seemed to me like that was down to the drugs. When I met her, she smoked weed, but she thought the people who took class-A drugs were stupid. She used to laugh at them.”
Pain was Winehouse’s muse, and her combustible relationship with Fielder-Civil provided plenty of inspiration. He introduced her to heroin and other hard drugs, as she had his name tattooed over her right breast and he inked hers behind his right ear. Theirs was an on-and-off relationship at first, as they were frequently separated by his infidelities and stints in prison.
“If you’re a musician, and you have things you want to get out, you write music,” she told an interviewer in 2006. “You don’t want to be settled, because when you’re settled you might as well call it a day.”
To put a finer point on the idea that she sought out chaos, whether through impulse or conscious focus, she also told an interviewer that year that “it sounds such a wank thing to say, but I need to get some headaches goin’ to write about.”
The grief and turmoil fueled her creativity, and the tumult with Fielder-Civil inspired many of the lyrics on Back in Black. Winehouse belted out her heartbreak, frustrations, and unhealthy addictions over the sounds of ’60s girl groups. The most famous of the songs, “Rehab,” proved foreboding.
Despite several rehab trips, Winehouse kept spiraling out of control
In the fall of 2005, Godwyn had seen enough of his client and friend stumbling through Camden, closer and closer to the edge of squandering her talent, not to mention her life. He tried to convince her to go to rehab, but she swore up and down to her father that she didn’t need the detox time, so the effort was short-lived. The song it prompted, however, became Winehouse’s most iconic tune, an anthem for her way of life and ultimate demise.
A brief period of greater stability arrived while Winehouse was dating a chef named Alex Claire. But their nine-month relationship didn’t last. In February 2007, the singer reunited with Fielder-Civil. Back in Black was released in the United States the following month, at which point she was fully in the grip of alcohol and drugs.
Winehouse did eventually agree to go to rehab, and more than once, but the months and years in between her brief attempts at sober living were increasingly sordid and sad, filled with private chaos performed for the public.
Magazine profiles documented her inebriated storming of the United States, where she played festivals and made TV appearances that were increasingly erratic and then disastrous. Her U.S. tour was canceled due to “exhaustion.” In October 2007, Winehouse and Fielder-Civil, who was now her husband, were arrested in Norway for marijuana possession. That December, she was photographed wandering around Camden in just her bra and jeans, looking emaciated. Soon after, in January 2008, footage of the singer allegedly smoking crack showed up in the English tabloid The Sun.
The event prompted Winehouse to finally agree to go to rehab, which she temporarily left on the night of the 2008 Grammy Awards. The ceremony proved to be the pinnacle of her career. The 24-year-old performed via remote satellite for the live broadcast and left with five trophies, tying the then-record for most wins by a female artist in a single night. Her hallmark hit, “Rehab,” won Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. During one of her acceptance speeches, she thanked her “Blake, incarcerated,” who was in jail due to a bar fight in 2006.
That wasn’t Winehouse’s only stab at rehab, but the months and years in between her brief attempts at sober living were increasingly sordid and sad, filled with private chaos performed for the public. She was arrested several times, for charges that included assaulting a fan, though she never spent time in jail.
Winehouse’s blood alcohol level was off the charts when she died
The world watched as Winehouse malfunctioned, her saga growing sadder by the month. She fainted in the summer of 2008 and was diagnosed with emphysema, a shocking warning that more smoking and drinking would permanently ruin her natural gifts.
The message didn’t take. Winehouse was booed off the stage at gigs around the world when she was too drunk to perform and canceled more concerts than she played. She left the stage in the middle of a performance in St. Lucia in early 2009, unable to remember lyrics and, in her own words, “bored.” Winehouse’s commitment to record a song for the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace fell through, and while she claimed to have quit doing drugs in 2008, alcohol became her constant companion.
There were bright moments, including performances for Nelson Mandela’s birthday and stretches of sobriety, when she’d begin working on new material and successfully perform in concert and on TV. But then she’d fall back into her old ways, with more assault charges and personal drama. Fielder-Civil filed for divorce in 2009, citing Winehouse’s infidelity. A new album promised for 2010 never transpired, and aside from a song she recorded with Tony Bennett (that later won her a posthumous Grammy Award), she never did record more music.
Winehouse checked back into rehab in the spring of 2011, emerging in May with hope of putting it all back together. But her final performance was a shambolic disaster in Belgrade, Serbia, in early June. She was found dead in her dirty, dingy home on July 23.
That fall, the coroner announced that Winehouse had died of accidental alcohol poisoning. Her blood alcohol level was .416% at the time of her death—more than five times the legal U.K. limit for driving. Never able to fully escape the iron grip of addiction, Winehouse became one more prominent member of the 27 Club.
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