Up until May this year there had been hopes Winehouse had found a way back from the abyss. She was set to begin work on a new album. Photograph: Dave Hogan/Getty Images

It made painful viewing. Amy Winehouse, the tiny woman with the contralto voice, was mumbling her way through some of her most famous lyrics and managing only a few strained notes as she stumbled around a stage in Belgrade, apparently drunk.

The Serbian gig was the first of what was supposed to be a 12-day European comeback tour. But the 20,000 fans who had paid around £40 a ticket to see the 27-year-old booed her and many left the venue in disgust during the 90-minute show, as the singer repeatedly dropped her microphone and left the stage, leaving her backing band to try to fill the gaps.

The next two dates, festivals in Istanbul and Athens, were swiftly cancelled by her management who had reportedly been fighting to keep her clear of alcohol, searching her hotel rooms and giving strict instructions to staff that she was not to be served drink. Winehouse, who claimed last October that she had been free of hard drugs for three years, had checked out of London's Priory clinic earlier that month, promising to continue alcohol addiction treatment as an outpatient.

The whole tour and all scheduled performances were cancelled on 23 June. Just a month later, the troubled, talented young singer was found dead at her Camden Square home.

Her father Mitch, a cab driver who had fought for years to keep his daughter away from the "druggies and the hangers-on" who he believed preyed on her, was on a plane to New York where he was due to perform at a jazz festival. He had repeatedly and publicly warned that he believed Amy would die unless she curbed her use of class-A drugs. She suffered from emphysema and her father told one magazine in 2008 that she had received advice that she was putting her life in danger by continuing to smoke cigarettes and hard drugs. "The doctors have told her if she goes back to smoking drugs it won't just ruin her voice, it will kill her."

At the time he appealed: "I'm saying to those drug dealers, and they know who they are, if they are supplying crack to Amy, then they've got to take responsibility."

Amy Winehouse was born to a Jewish family in Southgate, London, and as she put it in an early interview, "raised on jazz". As a little girl she loved to dress up and sing for the family and her neighbours. She got her first guitar at the age of 13 and started writing songs at 14. "I loved James Taylor and Carole King, Sarah Vaughan. But all the music around then was a bit dull, so I just started writing music to challenge myself, to write my own stuff," she said in one of her early interviews.

"It's very jazz-influenced but hip-hop- and beat-driven; everything I listened to from the old to the new."

By 2001 the teenager was singing with a jazz band when her then-boyfriend, soul singer Tyler James, sent off her demo to a management company. She was signed by Simon Fuller's 19 Management and kept an "industry secret" until she found herself at the centre of a bidding war between rival record companies that saw her as a perfect foil to the reality TV music show winners who were dominating the charts.

Her first album, Frank, was released in 2003 to critical acclaim but it was her second album, Back to Black in 2006, that shot her to international fame. It reached number one in the UK and number six in the US, selling 10 million copies and winning five Grammy awards. The album's hit single Rehab, with the line: "They tried to make me go to rehab. I said, 'No, no, no'" became the prescient anthem that followed Winehouse's life from then on, as she quickly became a poster girl for the shock rock'n'roll lifestyle.

Almost overnight it seemed that the 5ft 3in singer with the cheeky eye make-up,
bouffant beehive and the ever-present cigarette was on a destructive path. "The more insecure I feel, the more I drink," she said, when asked about her rapid weight loss, adding: "And the more insecure I feel, the bigger my beehive gets."

In 2007 Winehouse married Blake Fielder-Civil, a part-time gopher for a music video company with whom she had been having an on-off tempestuous relationship. His name joined her growing collection of tattoos - this one on her breast. The same year she was hospitalised for what was at first described as "exhaustion". She admitted later that the problem was a drug overdose.

The couple's relationship became fodder for the tabloids as they lurched from crisis to crisis before their divorce in 2009. Several video recordings made by Fielder-Civil ended up being sold on to tabloids, including one of him goading her to sing a racist song and another of Winehouse asleep surrounded by the paraphernalia of drug abuse.

Her mother Janis said in 2008: "I have known for a long time that my daughter has problems. We're watching her kill herself slowly. It's like watching a car crash - this person throwing these gifts away. I've already come to terms with her dead. I've steeled myself to ask her on what ground she wants to be buried, in which cemetery."

Until May there had been hopes that Winehouse might have been finding her way back from the abyss. She was bundled off to the Caribbean island of St Lucia where she was to work on a new album. There, hoped her family and friends, she would stay away from the drug dealers she knew so well in London. Sightings of Winehouse looking healthier suggested the plan was working, with the head of Universal Music, Lucian Grange, quoted as saying the new material was sounding "sensational".

The reservoir of goodwill in the industry towards Winehouse was enormous. She had been a huge trailblazing force in the music industry, credited with clearing the way for, and inspiring, Adele, Duffy and even Lady Gaga.

Spin magazine music editor Charles Aaron was quoted as saying: "Amy Winehouse was the Nirvana moment for all these women. They can all be traced back to her in terms of attitude, musical styles or fashion."

But last week the optimism began to evaporate. Veteran singer Tony Bennett, who recorded a song with her for his new album of duets, said he was "praying" for Winehouse.

In an interview with the Guardian, Bennett said: "Of all the contemporary artists I know, she has the most natural jazz voice, but I'm worried about her and I'm praying for her.

"She'd help everyone by sobering up and cleaning up her spirituality."

As fans and friends expressed overwhelming sadness at the loss of the singer, a member of her entourage told the Observer: "She was just like a really sweet little girl.

"Just a sweet tiny thing with a huge great voice. Maybe we all expected this would happen; maybe we all hoped someone else could stop it