Beyoncé Giselle Knowles

In January 2011, it was announced that Knowles would appear in a remake of A Star Is Born, to be directed and produced by Clint Eastwood for Warner Bros.. The remake will be the fourth telling of the A Star Is Born tale, the most memorable in recent years being the 1976 version with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. In February 2011, documents obtained by the WikiLeaks website revealed that Knowles along with Usher, Mariah Carey and Nelly Furtado had received as much as $1 million to perform for family members of Libyan politician Muammar Gaddafi. Rolling Stone magazine reported that the music industry was urging them to return the money they earned for the concerts. On March 2, 2011, a spokesperson for Knowles told The Huffington Post that she had donated the money to the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, established to aid the victims of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. On March 28, 2011, it was announced that Knowles' father and longtime manager Mathew Knowles would no longer manage her career. Knowles' publicist released a statement to The Associated Press revealing that Knowles and her father have split "on a business level." She now manages herself and has hired her own management team. In June 2011, Forbes placed Knowles eighth on its list of "Best-Paid Celebrities Under 30" for earning $35 million between the months of May 2010 and 2011. Forbes noted that the low placement for Knowles was due to the fact she spent most of the past year off the road and recording her then upcoming fourth studio album.
Knowles' fourth studio album 4 was released on June 24, 2011. The album was inspired by several musicians, including Fela Kuti, The Stylistics, Lauryn Hill, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, with first-week sales of 310,000 copies. This gave Knowles her fourth consecutive number one album in the US, and makes her the second female artist and third artist overall, to have her first four studio albums debut atop the Billboard 200. However, 4's first-week sales served as Knowles' lowest sales start with a studio album to date. Its lead single "Run the World (Girls)" peaked at number 29 on the Billboard Hot 100, and became Knowles' lowest charting lead single as a solo artist. The album's second single "Best Thing I Never Had" was released on June 1, 2011. It peaked at number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100. Knowles headlined at the 2011 Glastonbury Festival, performing a 90-minute set on the last day of the festival on June 26, 2011. She also performed at the T in the Park Festival in Scotland on July 9, 2011 and the Oxegen Festival in Ireland the next day. Knowles took the stage at New York's Roseland Ballroom for four nights of special performances. The set on each night of the 4 Intimate Nights with Beyoncé concerts was the entire collection of 4. For these four special nights, August 14, 16, 18 and 19, she performed her new songs to a standing room only audience.
On August 28, 2011 at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards, Knowles announced that she and Jay-Z were expecting their first child. She made the announcement during her red carpet appearance and again at the end of her performance of "Love on Top" by rubbing her growing stomach. The Huffington Post later confirmed that Knowles was 5 months pregnant and her pregnancy announcement had broken the "most tweets per second recorded for a single event" Twitter record, receiving 8,868 tweets per second. MTV reported that Knowles' performance of "Love on Top" and the announcement of her pregnancy at the awards ceremony helped the 2011's MTV Video Music Awards become the most-watched broadcast in MTV history, pulling in 12.4 million viewers. In addition, data from Google Insights showed that the most searched for term from August 29, 2011 to September 4, 2011 was "Beyonce pregnant" which reached 'breakout' levels – a term used by Google to describe a search with an increase of over 5,000 percent. Knowles' announcement of her pregnancy resulted in an increase in sales of her records, particularly 4, which had sold around 700,000 copies by August 2011. The album was certified platinum by the RIAA. 4 has sold 1,135,700 copies in the United States and 2,100,000 copies worldwide.
On October 8, a pre-taped performance of Knowles performing Michael Jackson's "I Wanna Be Where You Are" was shown at the Michael Forever tribute concert at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, Wales. In November 2011, Knowles was named the Highest Paid Performer Per Minute in the world by social media website Saucytime.com, earning £1.25 million for a five-song performance at a private New Year's Eve 2010 party on the island of St. Barts, equating to £71,040 for each minute she was on the stage. On November 30, 2011, Knowles received two nominations for the 54th Grammy Awards; Best Rap/Sung Collaboration for "Party", and Best Long Form Music Video for I Am... World Tour. In December 2011, Knowles was placed fourth on Forbes magazine's 2011 list of the "Top-Earning Women In Music" for earning $35 million.