Madonna

An icon of unabashed ambition and sexual magnetism, Madonna has been making headlines since the early MTV Age for her musical talents and much more. Cosmo caught up with the Material Girl in July 1987 to talk about her rising hopes for a career in Hollywood and her then-marriage to bad boy heartthrob Sean Penn.

Endearingly frank and forever flirting with the wild side, some things never change: 36 years later, she remains the star we fell for then. At one point, she took a side trip to Paris because a manager said he could make her another Piaf. He couldn’t. Or at least he didn’t, and Madonna returned to the Apple to begin her real push. She wrote songs, and she recorded tracks—original music on tapes—and took them around to dance clubs and got disk jockeys to play them while she sang along live. "You could almost feel like you were a star, when you were singing to tracks for 5,000 screaming maniacs at the Paradise Garage,” says Liz Rosenberg, Madonna’s friend and a Warner Brothers Records vice president. Madonna agrees. “To me, that was the world. That’s what I loved, nightclubs and discothèques. And then when the mass audience started catching on to who I was, it was like, Oh, I guess that wasn’t the whole world.”