Thaindian News

American singer–songwriter, and actress, Mariah Carey, was the first of a string of celebrities to perform at the memorial service for Michael Jackson today.

Carey sang I’ll be there in a duet with fellow American singer and songwriter, Trey Lorenz, in front of a capacity audience at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles.

The memorial service got underway some 45-minutes late, after the dead 80s King of Pop’s body was transported in a motorcade from the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Hollywood Hills, to the site of the memorial service, amidst a massive security cordon.

Jackson’s $US25,000, 14-karat gold-plated, solid bronze coffin, bedecked with a huge bouquet of red roses, was the center of attention in the stadium, with millions of people around the world joining together to watch the show.

Prior to the memorial service beginning it was estimated the world-wide viewing audience from television, streaming internet, movie theatre screenings and iPhone streams could easily top two billion.

Others to participate in the two-hour long memorial for Michael Jackson include:

* Brooke Shields
* Stevie Wonder
* Magic Johnson
* Lionel Richie
* Usher
* Kobe Bryant
* Berry Gordy
* Jennifer Hudson
* Shaheen Jafargholi (finalist on Britain’s Got Talent)
* Martin Luther King III
* Bernice A. King
* John Mayer
* Smokey Robinson
* Rev. Al Sharpton
* Ron Boyd (family friend)
* Pastor Lucious Smith (family friend)
* Andrae Crouch Choir
* Jeramine Jackson

At the conclusion to the memorial service Jackson’s body was returned to the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Hollywood Hills, again under tight security, for a private family funeral.

Other Hollywood personalities interred in the lushly landscaped, gently rolling hills and manicured green lawns there include Bette Davis, Lucille Ball, Telly Savalas, William Conrad, Buster Keaton, Liberace, Freddie Prinze, Andy Gibb, Jack Webb, Stan Laurel, Ricky Nelson, and more recently David Carradine.

The Forest Lawn memorial park and mortuary at Hollywood Hills is on the lower north slope at the far east end of the Santa Monica Mountains range overlooking North Hollywood and Burbank in the San Fernando Valley, in a park dedicated to the preservation of American history.

Before it was a cemetery Forest Lawn was used as a filming location, with the climactic battle scenes for D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, just one of the productions to use it.

Carey is ranked as the best-selling female artist of the US Nielsen Soundscan era (third best-selling artist overall), with sales of over 62.5 million albums in the US and more than 200 million albums worldwide.