Donny Osmond (born December 9, 1957 in Ogden, Utah) is an American entertainment personality. He is a singer, ex-teen idol and has worked as a talk show and game show host, actor and record producer. His family nicknamed him "Corky," as a boy, because he was a show-stopper.
Born to parents Olive and George Osmond, he is best known for being half of the brother-sister singing act Donny & Marie. He is the brother of Alan, Jay, Jimmy, Merrill, Wayne, Marie, Tom, and Virl Osmond. The two oldest children, Tom and Virl, were hearing-impaired; Alan, Jay, Merrill, Wayne, and Donny were members of the popular singing group The Osmond Brothers. Donny became a teen idol in the early 1970s when he broke away from his older brothers to become a solo act.
In the mid '70s, he was paired up with his younger sister, Marie. The duo recorded several albums together before and while starring in their own television variety series, Donny & Marie which aired on ABC from 1976-1979. He married Debbie Glenn in 1978. Together, they have five sons, with the oldest being 26-year-old Don Jr. through the youngest, 7-year-old Joshua.
When Donny and Marie ended, Osmond tried to reinvent himself as a solo artist. He spent several years as a performer before returning to the US charts with the song "Soldier of Love" and its follow up "Sacred Emotion." Within the past few years, he has released a Christmas album, an album of his favorite Broadway songs, and a compilation of popular love songs; his voice can also be heard in the Disney animated film Mulan, in which he sings "I'll Make A Man Out of You".
He also found success on the musical theater stage when he starred in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. During this period, he suffered from Social Anxiety Disorder; he also suffers from glossophobia, agoraphobia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. He was the cohost of a talk show with his sister in 1998 also called Donny and Marie. The show ran for two seasons, and it marked the first time the brother and sister had been together professionally in twenty years. He went on to host Pyramid, a syndicated television game show, which ran from 2002 until cancellation in 2004.
Donny, like the rest of his family, is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He received some criticism from members for not serving a mission like his religion encourages, but most of the furor over this lack of service has died down. In retrospect, he states, "It would have been nice to be able to have served a regular full time mission, but when I was of that age, my career was such that everyone, including my parents and the leaders of the church, thought that I could do a lot of good in the world by continuing being in the public eye, by living an exemplary life and sharing my beliefs in every way that I could" (www.donny.com).
In 2004, Donny Osmond returned to the UK Top 10 for the first time as a solo artist since 1973, with the George Benson-sampling "Breeze On By," co-written with fellow former teen idol Gary Barlow, of 1990s UK boy band Take That.
