Jennifer Rush (born Heidi Stern; September 28, 1960) is an American pop and rock singer. She achieved initial success during the mid-1980s with several singles and studio albums, including the million-selling single "The Power of Love", which she co-wrote and released in 1984. Her initial greatest success came in Europe, especially the United Kingdom. Her other successful singles from that period include "Ring of Ice", "Destiny", "I Come Undone", "You're My One and Only", "Higher Ground", "25 Lovers", "If You're Ever Gonna Lose My Love", "Heart over Mind", and "Flames of Paradise", a duet with Elton John. In the 1990s she had several charting singles, including "Tears in the Rain".

Rush was born Heidi Stern in the New York City borough of Queens to Barbara and Maurice Stern. She has two older brothers, Robert "Bobby" Stern and Stephen Stern (both professional musicians), and a younger sister. Rush and her brothers lived with their mother until she was a toddler, and then with their father and his second wife on the Upper West Side of the borough of Manhattan. Rush studied violin at the Juilliard School and also took piano lessons, although she did not enjoy these instruments and instead took to playing the guitar in private. When Rush was nine, the Stern family moved to Germany. Rush returned to the United States a few years later to live with her mother's family. She also lived for a time in Seattle, Washington, when her father was briefly a professor of voice at the University of Washington.

Rush's debut studio album, titled with her legal name of Heidi Stern, was released locally in Seattle, Washington, in 1979. After meeting singer, songwriter, and producer Gene McDaniels in Seattle, she went to Los Angeles to record demo songs with him. She credits McDaniels as being her first and most influential mentor as a songwriter and a singer.^{[citation needed]} In 1982, following McDaniels's persistence, Rush moved to Wiesbaden, Germany, where her father was an opera singer for a short period of time. She was then advised to change her name, which she did legally.^{[citation needed]}

Rush was first signed to CBS Songs Publishing Company as a songwriter in Frankfurt, Germany. At that time she was working for almost two years full time in the military in Munich.^{[citation needed]} She has never had vocal training but she is proficient in music theory due to her two years in the children's orchestra as first violinist.^{[citation needed]}

Rush's debut single with CBS Records International was "Tonight", which was released in West Germany under her birth name of Heidi Stern in 1982. The single did not enter any charts and she changed her stage name to Jennifer Rush the following year. In 1983, Rush released her first two singles under her new stage name, titled "Into My Dreams" and "Come Give Me Your Hand", both of which Rush co-wrote with producers Gunther Mende and Candy DeRouge. Neither song entered the music charts. In February and March 1984, Rush toured with the Berlin Philharmonic on a series of James Bond-themed concerts. She performed covers of "Goldfinger", "The Man with the Golden Gun", "For Your Eyes Only" and "Thunderball" at the concerts, and astonished the audience with her singing.

Rush's chart breakthrough came with the single "25 Lovers", which entered the West German singles chart in June 1984, spending 20 weeks on the chart and reaching its highest position at number 25. Her next hit single was "Ring of Ice", which entered the German singles chart in October 1984 and peaked at number 22. As with her first two singles, these songs were co-written by Rush with producers Gunther Mende and Candy deRouge. Mende and DeRouge were the producers behind Rush's debut album Jennifer Rush, released in West Germany in October 1984. Rush herself co-wrote eight of the ten songs on the album, and other songwriters included Mary Susan Applegate, Patrick Henderson, Richard Feldmann, Marcy Levy and Eric Klapperton.

The most famous song from the album was "The Power of Love". Initially this song was released as the fifth and final single from the album in January 1985 in West Germany, where it initially peaked at number 16 on the German Singles Chart. "The Power of Love" found greater success in the United Kingdom, where the song was released in June 1985. The song was a "sleeper hit", spending 16 weeks on the UK Singles Chart before finally topping the chart in October. It spent five consecutive weeks at the top of the UK Singles Chart and ultimately became Britain's best-selling song of 1985. It was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records at the time as the best-selling single by a female solo artist in the history of the British music industry. "The Power of Love" held that status until 1992, when it was outsold by Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You".

Following the song's success in the United Kingdom, "The Power of Love" was released as single throughout the rest of the world in 1985 and 1986. It reached number one on the charts in Australia, Austria, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal and South Africa, as well as in Spain with a Spanish re-recording titled "Si Tu Eres Mi Hombre Y Yo Tu Mujer". The single additionally reached the top 10 of the charts in Belgium, Finland, Greece, Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. The single was however less successful in the United States, where it peaked at number 57 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart.