Native New Yorker Lena Horne started singing at Harlem's famed Cotton Club in the 1930s, when she was still a teenager, learning about music from the likes of Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. Later that decade she sang with the bands of Noble Sissle and Charlie Barnet. In the early '40s she began a career in movie musicals, her appearances in Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather achieving iconic status. By this time, Horne had become a bona fide recording star, and her rarefied beauty made her a ubiquitous pinup girl of the WWII era. Over the ensuing decades, Horne's career encompassed everything from Broadway roles to Grammy Awards, and she continued recording and performing well into the 1990s.