How Prince Met Beautiful Women and Made Them Into Stars

The music icon had a string of marriages and high-profile girlfriends.

While Prince’s music was filled with sexual tension and provocative lyrics, he was an unlikely sex symbol.

Read: Transcript Reveals Frantic 911 Call From Inside Prince's Home: 'Everyone is Distraught'

The five-foot two-inch singer purposefully left people guessing about his sexuality.

But throughout his illustrious career, he always had a beautiful woman by his side.

Kerry Gordy, Prince's manager in the 1980s, told IE: “Prince really had his pick of the litter. He would go to the club and tell his people, 'Bring that girl over here!' And if that girl had talent - it was on!”

Denise Katrina Matthews was an unknown back-up dancer when Prince fell for her. He invented her name, Vanity, and she appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone with him in 1983.

"She was so beautiful,” Gordy said. “He knew he could make something around her.”

They wrote the script for the film, Purple Rain, together but broke up just before filming began. Apollonia replaced her in the movie and she and Prince quickly became an item.

Following the success of the film, he made her the front woman of the girl band Apollonia 6. The band recorded the song “Manic Monday,” which was written by Prince. It would later become a global smash thanks to The Bangles in 1986.

By 1985, she left Prince’s camp and launched a solo career.

One of the great loves of his life was drummer Sheila E. He proposed to her onstage, she wrote in her autobiography, The Beat of My Own Drum.

She told IE: "I was playing "Purple Rain," one of my favorite songs, I looked at him, he looked at me and he asked me to marry him at that exact moment." 

But their relationship didn’t last and they were broken up by the end of the 1980s.

Prince was married twice. His first wife was dancer Mayte Garcia. They tied the knot on Valentine’s Day 1996 when she was 22 and he was 37.

They had a baby boy, Boy Gregory, but the baby died from a genetic brain disease just one week after he was born. The marriage fell apart in 2000.

In 2001, Prince married Manuela Testolini, who worked for his charity. They were divorced five years later.

His appetite for beautiful women seemed insatiable. In 1989, he had a brief relationship with actress Kim Basinger before her marriage to Alec Baldwin.

Prince provided the soundtrack to her breakthrough film, Batman, which starred Michael Keaton as the comic book hero.

Prince is also rumored to have had an affair with Madonna when they worked together in 1995.

She shared a picture of them on Instagram:

Carmen Electra, who dated Prince in the 1990s, is also paying tribute to her former lover.

Read: Justin Timberlake, Katy Perry Lead Tributes to Prince: 'The World Lost A Lot of Magic'

"He gave me my name, he believed in me, I will always love him," she said in a statement.

But one relationship didn't work out so well, even on a professional level. Prince wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U” for Sinead O’Connor, which became a monster hit in the early 90s.

The two apparently hated each other and according to the Irish singer, they met just once and it ended in a fistfight.

Watch: Prince Was Reportedly Treated for a Drug Overdose Days Before His Death