Juan Gabriel

His father was institutionalised when he was a baby and his mother left him at a boarding school. He spent eighteen months in prison for a robbery he did not commit, and there began composing seriously.

He wrote more than eighteen hundred songs — "Amor eterno", "Querida", "Hasta que te conocí" — sung across half a continent. He never confirmed or denied his sexuality, and his answer to the question — "what you can see, you don't ask about" — became a set phrase.