Getty ImagesBritney Spears is living proof that there is such a thing as a second act in Hollywood—and that it can be quite a smashing second act if all goes accordingly.
The pop star has been making headlines for two decades now. She's been around long enough to have been an object of everything from envy, lust and idol worship to repulsion, derision and downright concern.
And through it all, good times and bad, she's been an object of fascination.
But our girl is turning 35 today—happy birthday, Britney!—and what she isn't anymore, and hopefully never needs to be again, is the comeback kid.
It seems that every time she's done anything productive in the past seven years, it's been hailed as a "comeback." A "return." A "new chapter."
How can that be? It didn't happen overnight, but once she was back, she was back.
Spears is hardly the only celebrity who's been forced to tote her past around like an albatross. Plenty of stars are submitted to the now vs. then treatment daily, usually because there's something has occurred, be it "now" or "then," that has led to a difference in circumstances.
Britney started out on top, cutting her baby teeth on The Mickey Mouse Club and then bursting onto the scene as a teenager with 1999's …Baby One More Time. Once again, coy school girl style was everything and everyone wanted to be Britney.
Her body was perfect, her songs were on replay, we wanted to learn every dance routine. Kids packed her concerts, parents in tow, and Britney posters papered the walls of childhood bedrooms and college dorms.
So came the debate, of course, whether or not she was too sexy for her devoted adolescent audience. The consensus? Maybe. But it's not as if she's as risqué as that "Drrty" Christina Aguilera girl or anything.
Those were simpler times, when pop's homecoming queen was dating the quarterback of 'N Sync.
The first round of Britney mania lasted about five years. Then she married Kevin Federline in 2004, barely nine months after saying "I do, ha, just kidding" with childhood friend Jason Allen Alexander in Vegas.
Not that all was lost right away. Her first fragrance, Curious, broke Elizabeth Arden's record for first-week sales. She released her first greatest hits album. Most importantly, she had her two sons, Sean Preston and Jayden James, in 2005 and 2006, who to this day are the loves of her life.
With all the good stuff going on in Spears' life these days—from her residency, Britney: Piece of Me, at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas; the release of her ninth studio album, Glory; becoming the third-ever person after Beyoncé and Whitney Houston to receive the Billboard Music Awards' Millennium Award; to her general health and happiness and, of course, those boys of hers—there's so much for the birthday girl to be celebrating today and every day.
The era that saw the platinum-selling artist star on the train-wreck of a reality show Chaotic, shave her head, worry some fans and terrify others, check in and out of rehab, become the butt of many jokes and, finally, be put on a psychiatric hold and end up in a conversatorship, is over.
Long since over, in fact. (Well, the conservatorship remains in place with dad Jamie overseeing her affairs, but if it ain't broke…)
"I don't see it as a comeback. I think I've never really left," Spears said on Today in September while promoting Glory's debut. "I've always been here. So, just like maybe a reinvention of myself and just a different time in my life—a really good, glorious time."
Spears has sold over 100 million albums. She's been engaged, weathered a few breakups and this summer told James Corden during "Carpool Karaoke" she's given up on men—but not the idea of more kids. She has released 20 fragrances, most recently Private Show in June.
She's both rather extraordinary as far as her enduring effect on the pop culture landscape is concerned, and quite human.
And she has long since passed the period where everything she does—from being a judge on X Factor to getting a Vegas show to hitting No. 1—should come as a surprise after all the turmoil of…
Eight years ago.
She bounced back impressively—in 2009, when her Circus Tour, which kicked off barely a year after she was hospitalized, raked in $131 million to be the fifth highest-grossing tour of the year.
Britney Spears has been moving forward ever since, though every endeavor is inevitably hailed as a step in the right direction rather than general creative output. She's just been going for it—making music, signing deals, mothering her kids and entertaining her incredibly loyal fans, who've never ceased rolling out the red carpet in their hearts for Brit-Brit.
Of course, the level of relief that her mental-health crisis didn't actually prove to be her undoing in the end is fair. There are more has-been stories than not, so Spears' success story bears being told and marveled over. However, it's never been fair to try to compare Britney now to Britney...at whatever arbitrary place in time you feel she was at her "best."
Yet the comeback narrative that has been applied to 2008's Circus, to 2011's Femme Fatale and to 2013's Britney Jean has persisted, all the way up until this year's Glory and her performance at the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards—her first VMAs performance since 2007, pre-hospitalization, and therefore her big "return."
See, we don't really need to do that anymore. What's going on now, and has been going on for about seven years now, is just Britney's career. Flourishing, hiccupping, evolving, sometimes backtracking. So it goes when you're trying to sustain a music career for going on 18 years.
Rooting for Britney Spears is still a perfectly respectable pastime, but perhaps 2016—punctuated today by her 35th birthday—will be the last chapter of her storied comeback.
There's nowhere to go "back" to, after all. Time to catch up with Britney, because she's about moving forward.