Janet Jackson Turns 60: Vintage Photos and Her Life Now

Before she was selling out arenas, before “Rhythm Nation” and “That’s the Way Love Goes” and “Control” — before all of it — Janet Jackson was just the baby of the family. The youngest of nine children, the little girl trailing behind her famous brothers, doing TV appearances she doesn’t even remember being asked to do.

She turns 60 on May 16, and looking back at her earliest years, it’s hard not to be struck by how much was already in motion before she ever had a say in it.

“I don’t ever remember being asked,” Janet told the BBC in 2024, reflecting on her first television appearance — a 1975 spot on the Carol Burnett Show. “I just remember doing it.”

That matter-of-fact delivery says everything about how Janet Jackson grew up. The Jackson family of Gary, Indiana, didn’t ease their children into the spotlight. They were born into it.

Growing Up Jackson

The photos from those early years are something else. There’s a tiny Janet — barely a toddler — photographed with her brother Michael at the family’s Hollywood Hills home in 1972. There she is at 7, celebrating older brother Jermaine’s marriage to Berry Gordy’s daughter Hazel alongside mom Katherine and siblings Michael, LaToya, and Randy in December 1973. And then there’s the moment at the 1975 American Music Awards, when an 8-year-old Janet charmed an entire arena as Michael brought her out to present the award for “Favorite Soul Group” to Gladys Knight and the Pips.

By 1977, she was already a regular on her family’s CBS variety show. That same year, she landed her first acting role on the sitcom Good Times. By 1982, she’d joined the cast of Diff’rent Strokes and released her self-titled debut album. And in 1983, that debut earned her a Billboard Magazine Year-End Number One Award for Top Black Albums Artists – Female.

None of it looked like a slow build. It looked like a family that moved at one speed: forward.

Her father Joe Jackson was the engine behind all of it — demanding, driven, and by Janet’s own account, controlling. Their relationship was complicated in ways she’s spoken about carefully and honestly over the years. But when Joe died in 2018, she found the words that mattered most.

“Without his drive, his strength, we wouldn’t have this success,” she said. “We’re a Black family that came from Gary, Indiana, and we broke all kinds of records all over the globe. That’s truth.”

At the 1986 American Music Awards — the year her album Control dropped and changed everything — Janet walked the red carpet with siblings LaToya, Marlon, and Rebbie. A year later, she’d be nominated for nine AMAs, winning two. In 1990, she got her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, showing up in full “Rhythm Nation” regalia with her parents and sister Rebbie by her side. And at the 1993 Grammys, she was the proud little sister, presenting Michael with the Grammy Legend Award, catching a sweet kiss on the cheek from him backstage.

That image — the two of them, beaming — is one of the most enduring of the whole Jackson saga.

Five Decades Later, Still Unbreakable

Janet’s Grammy-inducted Rhythm Nation 1814 turned 36 this year, and it still sounds urgent. She called it an “ongoing force” that is “simply too strong” to be stopped — and she wasn’t wrong. The album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in January 2025, a recognition that felt long overdue to anyone who’s watched its influence ripple through pop, R&B, and beyond.

She didn’t call her 2015 studio album Unbreakable by accident. And the Black Diamond Tour she had planned for 2020 — scrapped when COVID shut everything down — was named, as she explained on The Tonight Show, because that stone is “hard to destroy.”

“I don’t think about it,” she told The Guardian in 2024, when asked about the setbacks and controversies that have followed her career. “I just do what I do and I enjoy what I do. And if they want to say this and that, and give me those accolades, the acclaim you say, then so be it. And if they don’t, then so be it.”

That attitude — grounded, unfazed, deeply rooted in the music itself — came through again when she accepted the ICON Award at the 2025 American Music Awards.

“My family, myself, our dream wasn’t ever to be famous. We weren’t raised like that,” she said on stage. “We always had a special love for music and dancing and singing, and fame came with the result of hard work and dedication.”

She paused, then added: “My story, my family’s story, it’s truly an American story. This would have only happened in America. The one thing I hope for is that I’ve been an inspiration to others, to artists, to follow their dreams and succeed.”

Five Grammy Awards. Ten No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100. Iconic fashion — from the acid-wash jeans of 1985 to a blue Versace floor-length gown at the 2009 amfAR Gala in Milan to stealing the front row at the Christian Siriano Spring 2024 show in head-to-toe orange. A career in film and television that runs parallel to the music and deserves its own reckoning. The woman has done it all.

The Private Life She’s Chosen

And then there’s the chapter most people don’t see.

Since welcoming son Eissa Al Mana in January 2017 — at 50 years old — Janet has been quietly building a life in London, where she co-parents with her ex-husband Wissam Al Mana. She rarely posts photos of Eissa on social media. She doesn’t employ a nanny. She does school drop-offs and deals with the paparazzi and figures it out one day at a time.

“It is hard being a working mother. I don’t have a nanny. I do it all myself,” she told Stellar magazine shortly after the split from Wissam. “If my mother did it with nine children, there’s no reason I can’t.”

Katherine Jackson — who raised nine children in Gary, Indiana, and kept the family together through everything — is clearly never far from Janet’s mind when it comes to how she’s chosen to parent.

“My mother did it. Her mother did it. Why can’t I?” she said on Carrie & Tommy in 2019. “He’s first and foremost in my life. I get up, I go to sleep — everything is about him. He comes first in my life.”

Her friends, she told The Sunday Times, call her Superwoman. She doesn’t buy it. “God knows I’m not. But I think what they are seeing is the energy and that extra drive I’m getting from the inspiration of Eissa.”

Eissa, now 9, is already showing signs of his mother’s musical instincts. Janet told Jimmy Fallon the story of his first week of school: he brought a violin on day one, then came home on day three asking her to “turn my violin into a cello.” And his first musical obsession? Bruno Mars.

“Bruno was really the first music my son responded to,” she told Billboard in 2018. “That delighted both of us.”

When she’s spotted out with Eissa and the cameras find them anyway, she handles it the way she handles most things — with grace and forward momentum. “I get bothered and recognized, but I do it anyway,” she told InStyle. “I just try to be cordial and smile. And just keep it moving, really.”

Sixty years old. Five decades in the business. One kid she’s raising largely on her own in a city far from where she grew up. Janet Jackson, the baby of the family, still keeping it moving.