My aunt and uncle had a giant portrait of Diana Ross hanging in their den. It gave me an unspeakable comfort as a child. She was all diaphanous windswept black hair and cappuccino-brown skin, wearing a white mohair sweater, black leggings, and a bold red lip, cradling her knees between her arms and staring out at you with a hint of mystery and seduction. It’s one of those ’80s portraits so she has the ethereal glow that comes from a lens thick with vaseline. Whenever I think of the word “diva” that image pops into my head—one of otherworldly, almost divine benevolence, devoid of the negative connotations.

Call Her Goddess

Derived from the Italian for “goddess,” diva came into the English lexicon around 1883, when it was closely associated with prima donna (literally, “first lady”)—the principal female singer in an opera company. The legendary soprano Adelina Patti, at her peak in the late-19th century, commanded $5000 a night, paid upfront and in gold. Her contracts stipulated that she would receive top billing, in the largest font, and that she was "free to attend all rehearsals” but “not obligated to attend any."

Over time, both terms went from referring to a virtuosic female performer to a difficult and temperamental woman, the two concepts co-existing simultaneously if not symbiotically, so that a talented woman was invariably a temperamental woman.

My beloved Diana Ross has regularly been accused of such diva antics—that is, of being difficult—as I would learn from her unauthorized biography, Call Her Miss Ross. The title is a nod to the way in which the diva reportedly demanded others refer to her—something she denies.

“When I was growing up, people that worked at Motown and cared for us and supported us...we called them by ‘Miss This’ or ‘Miss That,’” Miss Ross told none other than fellow diva Oprah Winfrey. She went on to explain that this deference came out of respect, that respect is earned—inferring that she had earned it—and that she never “demanded” anyone call her Miss Ross. “I like it, though,” she added.

But what difference would it make if she did demand to be called Miss Ross? Would anyone have batted an eye if Frank Sinatra “demanded” to be called Mr. Sinatra? When you’re a bona fide national treasure and a touchstone to several generations, you should have the right to dictate the manner in which you are referred. That Diana Ross should be more pliable and is somehow not deserving of the respect that she earned is one of the many conflicting dichotomies that has always defined the diva.

I like to think I grew up in the last age of true divas. Mostly because I don’t see many of the ladies to whom that title is generously applied these days. I grew up on the Whitneys, Janets, Mariahs, and Madonnas. They exemplified to me what a diva was and should be: a strong, talented, charismatic, paradigm-shifting, larger-than-life, once-in-a-lifetime female entertainer who commanded a stage and demanded respect, who possessed some preternatural ability to weather the changing of time, trends, and tastes. They were, to put it simply, extraordinary.

But in the last two decades or so, the word diva has come to mean basically any sister doing it for herself, regardless of talent. This democratization of divadom appears to be a result of attempting to cleanse the word of its sense of entitlement, self-importance, and its inherited, not inherent, misogyny. Diva is now more of a state of mind or a lifestyle, than an honorific to which to aspire, or a slur to avoid. To understand how we got here, we must first delve into the cultural origins of the diva.

Diva Everlasting

Lyda Borelli

Italian cinema may be responsible for the modern idea of the diva. According to Mary Ann Doane’s Femmes Fatales, in Italian silent films a diva was a “woman of exceptional beauty who incites catastrophe—not by means of any conscious scheming but through her sheer presence.” Lyda Borelli is often considered the first cinematic diva. Her appearance in 1913’s Love Everlasting inspired a wave of fanatical imitation known as “borellismo” in which young women dressed, walked, and styled their hair like her, and should there be a divan within fainting distance, well, that’s where you’d most likely find them.

The rise of the diva coincided with the rise of Italy’s star-making system, or divismo. Though male stars rarely reached the same level of popularity, divas earned generous film contracts and became associated with glamour and extravagance. While the on-screen diva was cast as a tragic figure undone by forces she could not control, the off-screen diva was serving you Janet Jackson circa 1986.

The same year that borellismo exploded, Mary Pickford became the highest paid actress in the world when Famous Players started paying the 21-year-old $500 a week. Her first film under the studio, 1914’s Tess of the Storm Country, propelled Pickford to an unprecedented level of fame and introduced a new kind of screen heroine—a spirited, independent one, and not a damsel perpetually in distress—in what silent film scholar Eileen Whitfield calls “the first great star performance in American features.”

Pickford parlayed her success into gaining greater control of her own career; she would not only have her choice of scripts but also of director and her co-stars, eventually producing her own films, and co-founding the independent studio United Artists, along with Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in 1919.

Mary Pickford

She also demanded compensation befitting her title as “Queen of the Movies.” In 1916 she signed a contract that gave her half of her films’ profits, with a guaranteed $1,040,000, along with an additional $300,000 a year, plus $40,000 just to cover the time she spent looking over scripts. And that’s in 1916 money. Today, that’s like a cool $32 million for basically hanging out.

In 1920, Pickford and Fairbanks, Jr. became the OG Beyoncé and Jay-Z when they wed in what was hailed ”the marriage of the century.” In the ’80s, journalist and Pickford contemporary Adela Rogers St. Johns described her, without a trace of hyperbole, as “the best known woman who has ever lived, the woman who was known to more people and loved by more people than any other woman has been in all history.”

Mary Pickford laid the template for all other movie divas that followed, from Greta Garbo and Bette Davis to Julia Roberts and Nicole Kidman. But if you want to find the prototypical modern diva, you’ll have to go back to the world of opera.

First Lady

Maria Callas

Maria Callas was one of the most famous, and infamous, divas of the 20th century. A brilliant artist, her talents and achievements were often overshadowed by her alleged diva antics—something with which all true divas (and really, all successful women) must contend. Her life was full of tragedy, scandals, and controversy as the press and the public wavered in their affections. She died alone in Paris in 1977, and in the years since, her legend has grown so that today she is almost synonymous with opera itself. But that wasn’t always the case.

Playwright Terrence McNally, who wrote the Callas tribute Master Class, recalls Callas, beginning in 1956, being booed every time (six in total) she sang at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House because she “wobbled” during the “Casta Diva” aria from Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma. At one performance, the audience went so far as to pelt vegetables at the woman known as La Divina, or The Divine, because she had failed to be perfect. She was assaulted by fans who had anticipated, and eagerly awaited, her shortcomings. “Bunches of carrots and heads of cabbage,” McNally observes, “are not sold at the refreshments bar at the Metropolitan.”

By the time she was picking produce out of her wigs, Callas had earned a reputation for being difficult, to put it lightly. According to the Met’s longtime general manager Rudolf Bing, Callas was so difficult “because she was so much more intelligent. Other artists, you could get around. But Callas you could not get around. She knew exactly what she wanted, and why she wanted it."

Or as Callas put it, "Don't talk to me about rules, dear. Wherever I stay I make the goddamn rules."

And she was punished for it.

In 1955, following a Chicago performance of Madama Butterfly, Callas was served papers about a lawsuit from a man claiming to be her agent. Callas was photographed backstage yelling at the process server, and the image quickly went what passed for viral back then, stoking rumors that she was a temperamental diva and earning her another nickname, far more aggressive than La Divina: The Tigress.

Maria Callas

Coinciding with her Met debut, Time ran an unflattering cover story detailing Callas’s highly tempestuous relationship with her mother and her rivalry with contemporary Renate Tibaldi. The Time profile claimed that Callas, in what was the “I don’t know her” of the 1950s, said that comparing her to Tibaldi was like comparing champagne to Coca-Cola. The reality was a shade less shady: Callas said Tibaldi was Cognac not Coke. The latter came from a bystander, but Time ran with the fizzier quote.

Callas was not as technical a singer as Tibaldi but instead was celebrated for her interpretation, her intensity, and her dramatic performance. But diva devotees often treat their favorites like Highlander: there can only be one. The two women were actually respectful, even admiring, of one another, and didn’t have comparable voices—Callas was a dramatic soprano, Tibaldi a lyric soprano, and they had different styles of singing. Still, they were pitted against one another, just as Whitney and Mariah had been, just as Brandy and Monica had been, just as Britney and Christina had been, just as Rihanna and Beyoncé, etc, etc, until the end of diva time.

This period in her career also marked the beginning of Callas’s vocal decline, which some say was the result of a dramatic 80-lb weight loss between 1953 and 1954. However, theories surrounding this decline abound, with the strenuous nature of her early performances also carrying a certain toll. But female singers, much more so than their male counterparts, are often expected to be superhuman, and remain so throughout their careers.

From Judy Garland to Aretha Franklin to Whitney Houston to Mariah Carey, if you were ever a transcendent vocalist, you always had to be a transcendent vocalist, regardless of the limitations of your instrument or the human body or the caprices of human frailty, let alone other factors such as temperature and air quality that can affect the voice. Aretha famously requested that the air conditioning be turned off to protect her vocal chords but when the Queen of Soul arrived to rehearse for 1998’s VH1's Divas Live performance, she walked off the stage and threatened to pull out of the show because the air conditioner had been left running. None other than noted level-headed pragmatist Mariah Carey had to talk the Queen off the ledge.

Carey, herself, is no stranger to speculation about the quality of her voice, or lack thereof. Having performed dizzying vocal acrobatics in the early stages of her career, detractors eagerly await any signs that Mimi won't be able to emancipate those high notes, figurative bunches of carrots and heads of lettuce at the ready. When a diva can no longer entertain, or at least not at the level to which their audience has grown accustom, it’s like carte blanche to hold them accountable for their questionable behavior, to air the resentment built up over years of demands and diatribes. The press and the public seem to love nothing more than delighting in the downfall of a woman considered too big for her britches.

But as McNally notes, no one “detests” Callas today. She “has been deified transformed almost beyond recognition” from that snarling Tigress to The Divine, once again. Which just goes to show once you’re dead, or if you just hang around long enough, public opinion automatically shifts in your favor. Diana Ross, once the glamorous and controlling diva who “demanded” to be called “Miss Ross” is now a relatable grandma who leaves her fanny pack at Marshalls. Whitney Houston, long a punchline for her drug use and erratic behavior, is the subject of no shortage of documentaries that absolve her of her sins, that is, daring to be human. Maria Callas spent her final years living in isolation in Paris before dying of a heart attack, her operatic heyday far behind her at the tender age of 53. It’s just too sad that women who are vilified and victimized in life miss out on the flowers laid upon their legacy. Maria Callas’s legacy, however, has come to define what a modern diva is, for better and for worse.