Tomorrow, Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, former Boy Toy, ex-Material Girl, now Single Mom par excellence, celebrates the big four-oh. We can presume there will be candles (Madonna always liked candles) and that Lourdes, the star's 21-month-old daughter, will be present, but what will she be thinking as she cuts the cake and contemplates her middle age?
Motherhood seems to have made Madonna more maternal and indulgent, if recent quotes on the newer generation of female pop stars are anything to go by. On the Spice Girls: "I love them. I was a Spice Girl when I started out." On Courtney Love's glamorous makeover: "God bless her! Now we're all in the same club." She's also far too sussed not to realise that the burgeoning 1980s revival threatens to make her a figure of kitsch fun: "I didn't have a clue!" she says of her early days. "I was just a little bunny, hopping along. Who was I? And why did people let me have my hair like that?"
Maybe it was because a million teenage girls promptly went out and did their hair the same way. She tugged the beards of Catholic conservatives and fuddy-duddy liberals alike in the 1980s with her celebration of sex, power, money and glamour. Catholics were outraged by the dangling crucifixes and the Like a Prayer video, in which she got down and dirty with a chocolate-coloured saint, while liberals objected to the sex-for-sale image and the shameless acquisitiveness. It was a perfect marketing strategy, generating reams of free copy and making her the ultimate symbol of the decade.
The 1990s have been more difficult - the controversial Sex book (quaintly banned in Ireland) seemed an act more of desperation than liberation, and her records since, although they've sold respectably enough, haven't exactly set the world alight. But, even if her celebrity has well passed its high water mark, she's still one of the world's most famous women.
"She doesn't want to live offcamera, much less talk. There's nothing to say off-camera. Why would you say something if it's offcamera?" observes Warren Beatty in the revealing 1991 documentary In Bed with Madonna, but what if you have nothing much to say anyway, and what if the camera doesn't particularly like you? Madonna's natural filmic home has always been the music video, a medium which she more than any other single person helped to popularise. On a cinema screen, her strong features, squeaky voice and flat delivery made her the modern equivalent of the silent movie stars who couldn't cope with the transition to sound, and it's not surprising that her best-received role was in Evita, the closest thing in modern movies to an extended video clip.
She seemed to think for years that she could become a Bette Davis-type figure, but they don't make movies like Dark Victory any more; better actresses such as Sharon Stone and Linda Fiorentino have discovered how difficult it is these days to make a full-time career out of that particular niche, and there is the thorny question of her acting ability, or lack of it.
This is not a woman who gives up, however. She may have just pulled out of the starring role in 50 Violins, horror director Wes Craven's first venture into "serious drama", but she's still slated to star with Goldie Hawn in the movie version of the hit musical Chicago, and is due to start filming in October with Rupert Everett on The Next Best Thing, playing "a woman who talks her best friend into fathering her baby, then falls in love with another man". Talk of this kind raises the question of little Lourdes's conception, and the exact role of the putative dad, her personal trainer and "good friend" Carlos Leon. As to the actual method of impregnation, there has been loose talk about turkey basters, but no one really knows (after all, she did call her greatest hits compilation The Immaculate Collection).
In the manner of other maturing pop stars, she has diversified her interests. The record label she runs, Maverick, is more than just a vanity exercise (including a deal with Quentin Tarantino's company A Band a Part for movie soundtracks, appropriately enough given the Like a Virgin schtick that introduced the Tarantino style to the world in Reservoir Dogs). Her own current record, Ray of Light, is impeccably crafted, trendily ambient, but not particularly memorable.
But did the music ever matter that much? There was a golden age of big, brassy singles with plenty of oomph, such as Papa Don't Preach. On the other hand, the likes of Material Girl make Cyndi Lauper sound good. She has been very smart, though. Never a rock chick, she arrived in New York's East Village at a time when disco was on the way out and punk was the happening thing, but one of her first gigs was backing tacky disco star Patrick Hernandez. She has stuck closely ever since to the poppier end of dance culture, a canny choice which has helped sustain her career longer than nearly all her contemporaries.
Since the birth of Lourdes, she has been crafting her latest image change, coming over all moony and mystical in a new, pre-Raphaelite incarnation. Like many US celebrities she has turned to the latest religious fashion, the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah. "There's similarities in the Kabbalah with, say, Buddhism," she solemnly told MTV recently. "You absolutely are the master of your destiny and you have to take responsibility for the chaos in your life." If this sounds closer to Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking than to most religious beliefs, well Madonna's "philosophy" has never stood up to much scrutiny. This is her on Catholicism a few years ago: "If you're born a Catholic, it stays with you forever. Sin is always there and the feelings of remorse and guilt that go with it. You can't get away from it. I pray all the time." Yeah, sure. All the more impressive then, that she has spawned a huge academic industry devoted to decoding her "meaning".
But, as she glides so elegantly into middle age, what does Madonna mean any more? In many ways she is the flipside of that other blonde icon of the 1980s, Princess Diana, although there's no doubt who did better out of the deal. Where Diana got chinless wonders, hooray Henrys and feckless socialites, Madonna got Warren Beatty, Sean Penn and Sandra Bernhard. Of course, Beatty and Penn then went off and married prettier, more pliable young women like Annette Bening and Robin Wright, and Bernhard isn't on speaking terms with her any more, but there's not much chance of Madonna doing an Alanis Morissette on her personal life - the only references to pain in her songs are in her occasional flirtations with S&M imagery.
If there's one role she will never accept, it's that of victim. Never apologise, never explain, is the Ciccone way. And, of course, she's alive, kicking, unspeakably rich and no longer blonde. What more could a respectable matron of a certain age from Bay City, Michigan ask for?