Liza Minnelli

Well, that didn't last long. It is Liza with a "Z."

6. I first appeared on Broadway at age 19... I won a Tony Award.
7. My first marriage ended when I found out my husband was gay. Apparently I walked in on him with a guy by surprise. I would later moan that everyone knew he was gay except me.
8. I would marry three more times for a total of four. One less than my mother.
9. I did well on Broadway, but also in movies and TV.
10. I won one Oscar, One Grammy, and Three Tony awards in my career.
11. Again, like my mother, I had trouble with substance abuse. I did a stint at the Betty Ford Clinic to help clean myself up.
12. Late in my career I appeared in two very successful movies that reminded everyone I was still there.
13. I acted, I sang and Danced. I had my own TV special which was named after me.
14. In the year 2000 I suffered an illness that caused the doctors to tell me my career was done.
15. In 2002 I was back onstage.
16. Today I am more or less retired, but I do help raise money and contribute to a cause to help out those who suffer from HIV.

It took me a while, but finally figured it out after clue $5.

1. I was the youngest of 7 children.

2. My father was an experienced teacher, teaching his children music, languages and academic subjects.

3. As a child, I showed prodigious ability on violin and keyboards.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

That was quick, Animated! Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, baptized as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart.

4. While I was still young, I impressed European audiences with my performances.

5. At age 17, I was hired as a musician in Salzburg, but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position.

6. Due to lack of employment in Paris, I fell into debt had to pawn valuables to survive.

7. While visiting Vienna, I was dismissed from my Salzburg position.

8. However, I chose to stay in Vienna, where I finally achieved fame, but not financial security.

9. After being turned down by my main love interest, I married her younger sister.

10. We had six children, of whom only two survived infancy.

11. I am considered among the greatest composers of all time.

12. I composed more than 600 works, many of which are acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral music.

I bought Amadeus (movie) off of ITunes a few months back which piqued my curiosity about his life/children. Though the movie was very entertaining it wasn't very accurate. His 2 surviving sons never married nor had kids and they would be a good study in children of extremely famous parents.

I post my clues shortly...

Yes, although the movie was good, it's actually based on a play, which took the liberty of making Salieri seem like the jealous bad guy ... which reportedly never happened.

1. I was born and raised in University Place, Washington.

2. My Dad was, a car salesman, and my Mom, a secretary.

3. During high school and college, I played jazz guitar and banjo.

4. I was influenced by the "paranoid" sense of humor of my older brother, Dan. Dan played pranks on me, for example by taking advantage of my fear of monsters under the bed by waiting in the closet for the right moment to pounce. Dan "scared the hell out of me" whenever he could.

5. To supplement my income, I worked for the Humane Society as a cruelty investigator.

6. I voiced myself in the Simpsons 2010 episode "Once Upon a Time in Springfield."

7. I have been playing jazz guitar since my teen years. I took advanced lessons from two famous jazz guitarists, Remo Palmier and Herb Ellis. In exchange for guitar lessons from Ellis, I provided him with the cover illustration for the album Doggin' Around (Concord, 1988)

8. I retired in 1995... sort of

9. My most notable accomplishment (what I best known for) originally had a different name. The publisher changed it (which others in my field hated when publisher do that) but I had no such qualms, saying, "They could have called it Revenge of the Zucchini People, for all I cared.

If it's a jazz musician I really ought to know, but I cannot think of anybody ...

10. My twenty-three books of collected cartoons have combined sales of more than forty-five million copies.

Robert Crumb?

11. One of my more famous cartoons shows a chimpanzee couple grooming. The female finds a blonde human hair on the male and inquires, "Conducting a little more 'research' with that Jane Goodall tramp?" A representative from the Jane Goodall Institute thought that this was in bad taste and wrote a critical letter to me regarding the cartoon. I contacted the Goodall Institute to apologize only to find that Jane Goodall, who had been in Africa at the time of the cartoon's publication and only learned of it years after its initial publication, approved of it, stating that she found it amusing. Since then, all profits from sales of a shirt featuring this cartoon go to the Goodall Institute.

12. My greatest disappointment in life occurred when I was at a luncheon and sat across from cartoonist Charles Addams, creator of The Addams Family. I was not able to think of a single thing to say to him and deeply regretted the missed opportunity. Addams died in 1988.

Well, the only other American cartoonist whose name I know is Charles M. Schulz, but it seems highly unlikely that he would have done clue #11.

My only other guess would be Edward Gorey.

13. Since 1999 I have objected to my work being displayed on the internet, and has been sending takedown notices to owners of fan websites and users posting his cartoons. In a personal letter included with the requests, I claimed that my work is too personal and important to me to have others "take control of it". In 2007, I also published an open letter on the web to the same effect

Gary Larson?

Berkley Breathed

Yes!