What do we really want from our female pop stars? The simpering, personality-free types such as Geri Halliwell and Britney Spears, or the stroppy, spoilt, sulking, pouting diva who demands puppy dogs in her dressing-room and damn well wants them now? Come on, it’s a no-brainer. We want our stars full-fat and 100 per cent proof, not skimmed and alcohol-free. Geri and Britney may be easy on the eye, but the closest they get to divahood is asking for extra celery on the rider or a pack of Marlboros.

Enter Mariah Carey, the 21st century’s Barbra Streisand. Indeed, Streisand — renamed Barbra Strident after banning her stage crew from looking at her — would probably bow at the feet of the Superdiva.

Carey’s sensitivity to being upstaged by other stars is just run-of-the-mill diva behaviour. Whether it is blowing a gasket at Michael Jackson being accorded, in her opinion, a more extravagant build-up and dramatic entrance at the 2000 World Music Awards or, in the same year, allegedly demanding that Christina Aguilera be lopped off the bill at a concert because she was unwilling to share the limelight with anyone younger or prettier, it is usually just a sign of her limbering up: she takes her divahood more seriously than that. Some of the stories are glorious. At one music ceremony the organisers asked if Carey would slink down a staircase to accept her award. The response was forthright: “I don’t do stairs.” During a record signing she demanded that a store’s lavatory be redecorated. The best tale involved puppies, with Carey apparently asking for several to be delivered to her dressing-room prior to a concert.

Whence comes her relentless drive to push back the boundaries of this art? As Carey, 32, says: “Since I was a little girl I had this desire to be a star because I felt inadequate in a lot of ways; because I didn’t feel pretty, because my Mom kept moving all the time and I never felt settled. When I was growing up I was on my own a lot. That feeling has driven me to be who I am. I wish I could be more relaxed, but I can’t. I have to make sure everything’s right, down to the smallest detail.”

Carey’s feeling of “otherness” was exacerbated by her racial heterogeneity. Her father, Alfred, an aeronautical engineer who died this year, was part African-American, part Venezuelan, while her opera singer mother, Patricia, is second generation Irish. “My mother’s family hated her marrying my Dad and disowned her, denying to all their friends that she’d ever got married,” Carey said recently. “I just thought I was this unclean person and that I didn’t deserve to be alive. I freely admit that that left scars.”

Carey moved from Long Island to New York City at the age of 17 — just one day after graduating from high school — to pursue a music career. There she befriended the keyboardist Ben Margulies, with whom she began writing songs. Her big break came as a backing vocalist on a studio session with the singer Brenda K. Starr, who handed Carey’s demo tape to the Columbia boss Tommy Mottola at a party. According to legend, Mottola listened to the tape while driving home that same evening, and was so struck by Carey’s talent that he went back to the party to track her down.

Her 1990 debut album, Mariah Carey, was an extraordinary success, spawning four American No 1 singles and selling five million copies. Soon Mottola and Carey were having an affair and by 1993 he had left his wife and they were married. She was 23, he was 44. Although Carey was the most successful female artist of the Nineties and became the bestselling female artist in the world, her relationship with Mottola did not last. She felt stifled by his controlling influence and in 1998 they divorced.

Contrary to pundits’ predictions, she kept selling records with numbing predictability. Until, that is, she changed labels and signed to Virgin in a deal worth £70 million. Last year’s Glitter, the disastrous soundtrack to a dog of a film, flopped and she suffered a nervous breakdown, brought on, she claims, by exhaustion. The fact that her three-year relationship with the singer Luis Miguel had just ended can’t have helped. Then, last February, just to rub salt into the wounds, her new label paid her $35 million to terminate her contract.

But now Carey is back, with a new single, Through the Rain, and a new album, Charmbracelet. Carey seems to have made an effort to rein in her remarkable but often histrionic seven-octave voice and the result is more soulful, more touching. Has adversity mellowed her? Let’s hope not. Break out those puppies!

CV: Mariah Carey

Born March 27, 1970, in New York

Family Her parents, Alfred and Patricia, divorced when she was three. She has a brother, Morgan and a sister, Alison

Nickname At school she was known as Mirage as she was rarely there

Career highs During her career she has had more singles enter the charts at No 1 than any other artist and more platinum singles than any other female

Career low The movie Glitter (2001) led to the end of her contract with Virgin and, one would have hoped, her acting career. But she returned in front of the cameras for this year’s Wisegirls

Setting the record straight “I’m not vain, I’m insecure”

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