Daughter to follow Whitney Houston into showbiz
LOS ANGELES – Whitney Houston’s daughter said Sunday she plans to follow her mother into show business, while the drug-troubled star’s sister-in-law admitted her untimely death could have been predicted.
In her first interview since Houston’s death last month aged 48, Bobbi Kristina — Houston’s daughter from her stormy relationship with singer Bobby Brown — also said she still hears her late mother’s voice.
“I feel her passing through me all the time,” she told TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey. “Lights turn on and off and I’m like, ‘Mom, what are you doing?’ I can still laugh with her and still talk to her.”
Asked if she will follow her mother into show business, the teenager said: “I have to carry on the legacy … We’re gonna do the singing thing. Some acting, some dancing.”
“It’s a lot of pressure, but she prepared me for it,” she added.
The late star’s sister-in-law Patricia Houston meanwhile said it had been possible to forecast that drugs would claim the singer’s life. “The handwriting was kind of on the wall. I would be kidding myself to say otherwise.”
Houston was found dead on February 11 in a hotel room bath tub, aged 48, a day before the Grammys and hours ahead of a glittering pre-Grammy party in the Beverly Hills hotel where she died.
The singer of hits including “I Will Always Love You” sold over 170 million records during a nearly three-decade career, but fought a long battle against substance abuse while trying to keep her performing talent alive.
Speculation has raged since her death that the singer may have succumbed to a lethal cocktail of prescription drugs and alcohol, though official results from her autopsy were not expected for several weeks after her death.
As Sunday marked a month exactly since she died, the results could in theory come within days.
Her daughter said her mother remains with her. “She literally is an angel. I saw her hurt. I saw her cry. We held each other through that,” she said, when asked what she wanted people to know about her mother.
She insisted: “They don’t know who she was. Everything people are saying about her — all that negativity, it’s garbage. That’s not my mother. … In reality, I know who she was. Her family knows who she was.”
