From child to pop star Maite Kelly talks about "unhealthy megalomania" in her family
Maite Kelly became internationally famous in her childhood with The Kelly Family. Now the 45-year-old singer reveals in an interview that success with her family has not only been good.
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- When The Kelly Family made their international breakthrough in the 1990s, Maite Kelly was still a teenager.
- Not all members of the family were able to cope equally well with the huge musical success.
- Maite Kelly, now 45, told an interviewer how fame and money had hurt her father Dan in particular.
"I had a lot of freedom as a child. But I had to fight for that freedom." Nevertheless, Maite Kelly thinks back to her childhood with mixed feelings.
She was 15 years old when The Kelly Family made their breakthrough, so she was still a teenager. After the success of the album "Over the Hump" in 1994, "there was a phase in which all the money wasn't good for some people in my family", says the now 45-year-old singer in an interview with the German weekly newspaper "Zeit".
She continues: "The unhealthy megalomania took some people in my family with it."
Father Kelly became addicted to alcohol
Maite Kelly reveals that her father Dan Kelly, who died in 2002, was "not free of it" either. Despite his success and international celebrity, he believed he could control and manage everything on his own.
Maite Kelly's mother died of breast cancer in 1982 at the age of just 36. Father Dan then also took on the role of mother.
As a result, he ended up being addicted to alcohol and suffered greatly from his addiction. "My father was an all-or-nothing type of person," Kelly told Die Zeit. Dan Kelly later went to Alcoholics Anonymous and managed to withdraw.
Maite Kelly: "A life out of reality"
At that time, The Kelly Family was already successful, so life was anything but normal for the children. Back then, they mainly lived in hotels and were constantly on the road. "A life out of reality," says Maite Kelly.
"This parallel world harbors the danger that you settle into a kind of realm of your own, surrounded only by people who are paid by you or profit from you."
Maite Kelly was born in 1979 as the second youngest of 13 siblings in the family band The Kelly Family, whose career began with street music. The album "Over the Hump" remained in the charts in Germany alone for 112 weeks in 1994, half of which were in the top ten.
Kelly later began a solo career as a pop and musical singer. Her song "Warum hast du nicht nein gesagt", a duet with Roland Kaiser, is one of her best-known hits.
From 2005 to 2018, the singer was married to French model Florent Michel Raimond. The couple have three daughters together.
