In 2010 she was named by Billboard the 5th most influential and best-selling classical artist of the 2000s decade in the US and according to Nielsen SoundScan, she has sold 6.5 million albums in that country.

Brightman is the first artist to have been invited twice to perform at the Olympic Games, first at the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games where she sang “Amigos Para Siempre” with the Spanish tenor José Carreras with an estimated global audience of a billion people, and 16 years later in 2008 in Beijing, this time with Chinese singer Liu Huan, performing the song “You and Me” to an estimated 4 billion people worldwide.

In 2012, Brightman was appointed as the UNESCO Artist for Peace for the period 2012–2014, for her “commitment to humanitarian and charitable causes, her contribution, throughout her artistic career, to the promotion of cultural dialogue and the exchanges among cultures, and her dedication to the ideals and aims of the Organization”. Also, since 2010, Brightman is Panasonic’s global brand ambassador.

Apart from music, Brightman has begun a film career, making her debut in Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008), a rock opera-musical film directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, and in autumn 2011 and early 2012 Stephen Evans’ “First Night”, starring opposite Richard E. Grant. Brightman is the world’s richest female classical performer with a fortune of £36m (about US$56m).

In 2014, she began training for a journey to the International Space Station set for 2015. In May 2015, she postponed the flight until further notice, citing personal reasons.

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