Anthony and his father clashed when he began favoring Anglo pop, and he initially scored as a club-music artist with the 1991 dance hit "Ride on the Rhythm". Still, he was a natural when he finally decided to record salsa, developing his distinctive from-the-heart style of starting calmly and building to exultant crescendos. After the success of his first two salsa albums, he finally won a Best Tropical Latin Grammy for his third ("Contra La Corriente" 1997) and became the first salsa singer to sell out Madison Square Garden that year. Having made his feature debut in "Hackers" (1995), he exhibited a magnetic screen presence and an ability to easily play characters 10 years younger than himself as the restaurant's bus boy in "Big Night" and as a gangbanger in "The Substitute" (both 1996). Anthony subsequently made his Broadway debut starring as the teenage Salvador Agrand (Ruben Blades played him as an older man) in Paul Simon's "The Capeman" (1997). Despite lukewarm reviews for the show and an abbreviated run, he received enthusiastic notices for his performance.

Sony Music Entertainment chairman Thomas 'Tommy' Mottola saw more than just a salsero in the charismatic singer. Sensing that Latin music could snowball into a kind of "new Seattle scene," Mottola brought Anthony aboard Sony's Columbia Records, along with artists like Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez, though contractual difficulties with his former label (RMM Records) delayed the release of his 1999 English-language album "Marc Anthony" (The singer had previously released one album in English). The skinny youth who had matured into a legitimate heartthrob delivered a ballad-heavy disc as his introduction to pop audiences, but it was the scarcer upbeat, Latin-tinged songs (i.e., "I Need to Know") that really grabbed attention. His bilingual, multi-record deal worth more than $30 million promised to yield two records in 2000, one a return to salsa, and the other a move into Spanish-language pop. He also upped his screen profile considerably with "Bringing Out the Dead" (1999), playing the dreadlocked, brain-damaged homeless man described by director Martin Scorsese as "the soul of the movie." That same year he wrote and performed the song "You Sang to Me," which was promienntly featured in the Julia Roberts-Richard Gere romantic comedy "Runaway Bride."

In 2001 Anthony had a supporting role in the Spanish language film "En el tiempo de las mariposas" aka "In the Time of the Butterflies," the true story of the Mirabel sisters of the Dominican Republic, who were found murdered in 1960 after opposing the local military dictatorship. The singer would endure some personal trevails--including splitting and reconciling and splitting again with his wife Dayanara Torres Delgado and being romantically linked to his longtime friend, actress and singer Jennifer Lopez following her highly hyped relationship with Ben Affleck--before returning before the cameras for the action thriller "Man on Fire" (2004), playing a wealthy Mexico City industrialist with an American wife who hires a bodyguard (Denzel Washington) to keep his ten-year-old daughter (Dakota Fanning) safe. Shortly there after, Anthony secured a quickie Caribbean divorce from his wife Dayanara Torres and just days later shocked fans around the world with a sudden and unexpected marriage to Lopez just five months after her split from Affleck.