Chester Bennington

Chester Bennington was an American singer and songwriter whose two-decade music career — primarily as the lead singer of American rock band Linkin Park across 1999–2017 — produced one of the foundational documents of early-21st-century American nu-metal-and-rock music. He was born Chester Charles Bennington on March 20, 1976, in Phoenix, Arizona, into an American working-class family. His father Lee Russell Bennington was a Phoenix-area police-detective, and his mother Susan Eubanks was a nurse.

His childhood was shaped by his repeated 1983–1989 sexual-abuse experiences (which produced his later biographical narrative across multiple subsequent interviews) and the 1987 separation of his parents (which produced his subsequent custody-arrangement biographical narrative across his teenage years). His teenage and early-adulthood career across 1989–1998 across multiple Phoenix-area garage-rock bands launched his early-career path.

His 1999 audition for the Los Angeles-area band Xero (which subsequently became Linkin Park in 2000) — through Linkin Park's record-label-executive friend Jeff Blue — launched his 1999–2017 18-year tenure as the lead singer of Linkin Park. The October 24, 2000 first commercial Linkin Park album Hybrid Theory — released by Warner Bros. Records — sold over 32 million copies worldwide and produced his early-2000s American rock-music public profile. The album's foundational singles — particularly "In the End," "Crawling," and "One Step Closer" — produced his early-2000s American nu-metal-and-rock-music public profile.

His subsequent Linkin Park albums — particularly the 2003 second album Meteora, the 2007 third album Minutes to Midnight, the 2010 fourth album A Thousand Suns, the 2012 fifth album Living Things, the 2014 sixth album The Hunting Party, and the 2017 seventh album One More Light — produced his 2000s and 2010s American rock-music public profile. He died on July 20, 2017, at age 41, by suicide at his Palos Verdes Estates, California home (on what would have been his close friend Chris Cornell's 53rd birthday — Cornell had died by suicide two months earlier on May 17, 2017). He was married twice — to Samantha Marie Olit (1996–2005) and Talinda Ann Bentley (2005–2017). He had six children.

His name Chester derives from the Old English place-name meaning "camp" or "fortress." Chester was a popular American boys' name through the early 20th century.