Biography | Lionel Richie — The Star Poured on His Fifty-Fourth Birthday

The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce set Lionel Richie's recording star at 7018 Hollywood Boulevard on 20 June 2003.

It was his fifty-fourth birthday. The crowd sang the birthday song before the speeches.

Jay Leno joked about the parking structure behind the sidewalk.

The official category is Recording. The Chamber list and the published star tables agree on the address.

Do not treat the Chamber's Sunset Boulevard suite number as the pin. That is an office.

The terrazzo is on Hollywood Boulevard, in the block that was a garage when Leno said so.

Fifteen years later, on 7 March 2018, Richie put hands and feet into cement in the forecourt of the TCL Chinese Theatre a few blocks west. That is a separate sidewalk and a separate visit.

The 2003 star is the one a visitor can still read without a ticket.

By then the Tuskegee freshman who had named a campus band out of a dictionary had the Commodores catalog, the solo run of the early 1980s, We Are the World, and an Oscar behind him.

The star sits among other recording names on the same stretch of boulevard. It does not need a ceremony to be used. You look down and it is there.

Photo: Georges Biard, Lionel Richie in 2012, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The portrait is later than the ceremony; a rights-clear photograph of the 2003 unveiling was not available.