Christopher Ciccone, an artist and interior decorator who worked closely with his older sister, Madonna, during her rise to global superstardom in the ’80s and ’90s, died Friday. He was 63. The cause of death was cancer.
According to a statement from his family, Ciccone died peacefully, surrounded by his loved ones, including his husband, British actor Ray Thacker.
On Instagram Sunday, Madonna paid tribute to her brother with a post that celebrated their close bond and acknowledged the sometimes turbulent nature of their relationship.
“He was the closest human to me for so long,” wrote the pop star. “It’s hard to describe our bond. But it grew out of an understanding that we were different and society was going to give us a hard time for not following the status quo. We took each other’s hands and we danced through the madness of our childhood.”
Ciccone was the fifth child and third son born to Silvio and Madonna Ciccone and was raised in Rochester, Mich., where both his personal and creative identities bloomed to reveal an expansively artistic soul,” according to his family.
After studying dance in college, he moved in 1982 to New York where Madonna, two years his senior, was already making a name for herself in the downtown art and music scene. He was a backup dancer in the video for her single, “Lucky Star,” and played an important role behind the scenes on her blockbuster tours.
Ciccone started as a dresser, helping Madonna make quick costume changes between numbers, but he worked his way up to serving as art director of the provocative Blonde Ambition tour in 1990, chronicled in the documentary “Truth or Dare.” He was also the tour director on the Girlie Show tour in 1993. Ciccone decorated several of Madonna’s homes and pivoted to a career as an interior designer. He was one of several gay men who had a formative influence on Madonna’s aesthetic and pop persona.
The siblings’ relationship cooled sometime in the late ‘90s. Ciccone published a memoir, “Life With My Sister Madonna,” in 2008, in which he claimed that their relationship was strained over creative and financial differences and because of her marriage to British filmmaker, Guy Ritchie. But by 2012, Ciccone said he was back on good terms with his sister.
In more recent years, he’d moved back to Michigan, where his family operates a vineyard, and continued to work as a painter and interior designer.
Ciccone’s death arrives just two weeks after his stepmother, Joan Ciccone, died of cancer. His older brother, Anthony, died last year. His mother died of breast cancer shortly after his birth in 1963.
Ciccone is survived by his sister Madonna, husband Ray Thacker and father Silvio Ciccone.