One week after celebrating Mother’s Day with five of her six children, Madonna paid tribute to her late mother, Madonna Louise Fortin Ciccone, with a striking new look.
The 66-year-old pop icon swapped her signature platinum-blonde bob for a wavy brunette wig, sharing the transformation on Instagram with the caption: “I missed my mother so I channeled her…”
The Michigan-born singer, who has over 54 million social media followers, posted multiple angles of the look—clearly styled with a hairpiece, likely crafted by her longtime hairstylist, Orlando Pita.
Since the seven-time Grammy winner was named after her mother, the family affectionately called her “Little Nonnie.”
Madonna was just five years old when her mother, Madonna Louise Fortin Ciccone, passed away at the age of 30 in 1963 from breast cancer, shortly after giving birth to her sixth child.
Reflecting on the profound loss in the Sky documentary Becoming Madonna earlier this year, the pop icon said: “It was just the greatest event of my life. It was like a part of my heart was ripped out.”
“I was forced to grow up fast and understand my mother’s death—to grasp the psychological toll and everything that was happening around me. It was too much for a child, I think,” Madonna has said, reflecting on her early trauma.
The pop icon also revealed last year that she was never told her mother was terminally ill. “Nobody told me my mother was dying,” she wrote on Instagram. “I just watched her disintegrate mysteriously, and then she disappeared, and there was no explanation except that she had gone to sleep—which explains my tumultuous relationship with sleep.”
As a tribute, Madonna included an image of her mother during each performance of “Mother and Father” on her 81-date Celebration Tour, which grossed $225.3 million. “When I stepped out on the stage and looked up at my mother’s face every night, I said, ‘Hello.’ I said, ‘Goodbye.’ I said, ‘Thank you. I hope you’re proud of me.’ I said, ‘Please protect me and keep me sane.’”
She famously visited her mother’s grave at Calvary Cemetery in Kawkawlin, Michigan, in a poignant scene from Alek Keshishian’s 1991 documentary Truth or Dare.
Her father, Silvio Ciccone—who turns 94 on June 2—remarried the family’s housekeeper, Joan Gustafson, in 1966. Joan passed away from cancer on September 24 at the age of 81.#newsafro_
