Mariah Carey Acting career
 After receiving Billboard's Artist of the Decade Award and the World Music Award for Best-Selling Female Artist of the Millennium, Carey parted from Columbia and signed a contract with EMI's Virgin Records worth a reported US$80 million. She often stated that Columbia had regarded her as a commodity, with her separation from Mottola exacerbating her relations with label executives. Just a few months later, in July 2001, it was widely reported that Carey had suffered a physical and emotional breakdown. She had left messages on her website complaining of being overworked, and her relationship with Luis Miguel was ending. In an interview the following year, she said, I was with people who didn't really know me, and I had no personal assistant. I'd be doing interviews all day long, getting two hours of sleep a night, if that. During an appearance on MTV's Total Request Live, Carey handed out popsicles to the audience and began what was later described as a strip tease. By the month's end, she had checked into a hospital, and her publicist announced that Carey was taking a break from public appearances.
A scene from Carey's film Glitter (2001).Critics panned Glitter, Carey's much delayed semi-autobiographical film, and it was a box office failure. The accompanying soundtrack album, Glitter, was inspired by the music of the 1980s and featured collaborations with Rick James and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis; it generated Carey's worst showing on the U.S. chart. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch dismissed it as an absolute mess that'll go down as an annoying blemish on a career that, while not always critically heralded, was at least nearly consistently successful, while Blender magazine opined, After years of trading her signature flourishes for a radio-ready purr, [Carey]'s left with almost no presence at all. The lead single, Loverboy (featuring Cameo), reached number two on the Hot 100 thanks to a price cut, but the album's follow-up singles failed to chart.
Columbia released the low-charting compilation album Greatest Hits shortly after the failure of Glitter, and in early 2002, Virgin bought out Carey's contract for $28 million, creating further negative publicity. Carey later said her time at Virgin was a complete and total stress-fest ... I made a total snap decision which was based on money, and I never make decisions based on money. I learned a big lesson from that. Later that year, she signed a $20 million contract with Island Records and launched the record label MonarC. To add further to Carey's emotional burdens, her father, with whom she had little contact between childhood and that year, died of cancer.
Following a well-received supporting role in the 2002 film WiseGirls, Carey released the album Charmbracelet, which she said marked a new lease on life for her. Sales of Charmbracelet were moderate, and the quality of Carey's vocals came under severe criticism. The Boston Globe declared the album the worst of her career, revealing a voice no longer capable of either gravity-defying gymnastics or soft coos, and Rolling Stone commented, Carey needs bold songs that help her use the power and range for which she is famous. Charmbracelet is like a stream of watercolors that bleed into a puddle of brown. The album's only charting single in America, Through the Rain, was a failure on pop radio, which had become less open to maturing diva stylists such as Carey, Whitney Houston and Celine Dion in favor of younger singers such as Kelly Clarkson and Christina Aguilera, who had vocal styles very similar to Carey's.
I Know What You Want, a 2003 Busta Rhymes single on which Carey guest starred, fared considerably better and reached the U.S. top five. Columbia later included it on the remix collection The Remixes, Carey's first album not to receive an RIAA sales certification. That year, she embarked on the Charmbracelet World Tour and was awarded the Chopard Diamond award for selling over 100 million albums worldwide. She was featured on rapper Jadakiss's 2004 single U Make Me Wanna, which reached the top ten on Billboard's R&B/Hip-Hop chart.
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