- Album list
- Singer Intro
Amanda Lear (née Tapp; born 18 November 1939) is a French singer, lyricist, painter, television presenter, actress and former model.
Lear grew up in the south of France and in Switzerland, and studied art in Paris and at Saint Martin's School of Art in London. She began her professional career as a fashion model in the mid-1960s and went on to model for Paco Rabanne and Ossie Clark among others. Around that time she met the Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí and would remain his closest friend and muse for the next 15 years. Lear first came into the public eye as the cover model for Roxy Music's album For Your Pleasure in 1973. From the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, she was a million-album-selling disco queen, mainly in Continental Europe and Scandinavia, signed to Ariola Records. Lear's first four albums earned her mainstream popularity, charting in the Top 10 on European charts, including the best-selling Sweet Revenge (1978). Her biggest hits included 'Blood and Honey', 'Tomorrow', 'Queen of Chinatown', 'Follow Me', 'Enigma (Give a Bit of Mmh to Me)' and 'Fashion Pack'.
In the mid-1980s Lear positioned herself as one of the leading media personalities in mainland Europe, especially in Italy and in France where she hosted many popular TV shows. She had also developed a successful painting career, regularly exhibiting her works in galleries across Europe for the next three decades, and continued to make music, earning minor hits such as 'Incredibilmente donna' and 'Love Your Body'. Amanda's 1980s musical output saw her experimenting with different genres and trying to revive her career by re-recording earlier hits to various levels of success. 1980s also saw her release two books: an autobiography My Life with Dalí and a novel L'Immortelle.
Since the 1990s her time has been divided between music, television, movies and painting. Despite frequent album releases, she failed to achieve success on charts with her music. However, her television career remained successful, with Lear hosting numerous prime time TV shows, occasionally making guest appearances in French and Italian TV series. She has also performed acting and dubbing roles in independent as well as major film productions. In the late 2000s Lear would reinvent herself as a theatrical actress, performing in long-running stage plays in France. To date, she has sold over 25 million singles and 15 million albums worldwide. Lear is also a widely recognized gay icon.
Early life
Lear's origins are unclear, with the singer herself providing different information about her background and keeping her birth year a secret even from her long-term husband. Contested facts include her birth date and place, her birth gender, names and nationalities of her parents, and the location of her upbringing. Most sources claim 18 November 1939 to be her birth date, including GEMA, but Lear has variously given her date of birth as 1946, 1948 and 1950. During a 2010 interview with a French newspaper Libération, Lear presented her identity card to a journalist, which read: 'born 18 November 1950 in Saigon'. This date seems to be age fabrication, as public records show that she began university in September 1964, and that she married in December 1965.
As for her birthplace, Saigon and British Hong Kong appear to be most credible versions, but places like Singapore, Switzerland or even Transylvania have also been rumoured as the singer's birthplace by different sources. She was an only child to her parents who later divorced. Most sources, including Lear's 1965 wedding certificate, confirm that her father was a French army officer, possibly of British origin. Her mother appears to have had a Russo-Asiatic background. In a 1976 interview with Carmen Thomas for a German television show, Lear confirmed that her father was British and mother was Russian, and that they had already both died. However, she would later claim her mother had a French background.
Lear's alleged transgender background has been commented upon in the media and in the biographies of those who knew Lear earlier in her life, including Salvador Dalí, with Dali's biographer Ian Gibson even devoting an entire chapter to her. April Ashley, a famous transgender entertainer and model, has long claimed that in the 1950s and early 1960s, she and Lear, whose birth name she claimed was Alain Tap, were working together in transvestite revues in Paris at Madame Arthur and Le Carrousel. In her book, April Ashley's Odyssey, she recalls Lear performing drag acts under the stage name Peki d'Oslo. Similar facts have been reported by Romy Haag, a transgender artist living in Germany, who ran a popular nightclub Chez Romy in Berlin and knew Amanda closely, and Bibiana Fernández, a Spanish transgender actress and singer. Some sources even insinuate that it was Dalí himself who sponsored Lear's sex reassignment operation in Casablanca in 1963, carried out by doctor Georges Burou, and also that it was he who invented her stage name based on the pun of the Catalan language 'L'Amant de Dalí' (Dalí's lover). Rumours claiming that Lear was a non-operative transgender woman or intersex were circulating at the beginning of her singing career, which stopped after she posed nude for Playboy in the late 1970s.
Despite Lear herself contradicting transgender rumours already in the 1970s and explaining they were a part of strategy to draw public attention, they have persisted to date. When asked by Carmen Thomas in a 1976 interview whether it was true that she was assigned male at birth, Lear replied that it was 'a crazy idea from some journalist'. She would later claim in Interview magazine that it was David Bowie who started the rumour. She would also address these rumours in her songs 'Fabulous (Lover, Love Me)' and 'I'm a Mistery' (deliberately misspelled as to reference the word 'mister'). Despite some sources claiming her transgender background is an open secret, she would always flatly deny it, even when confronted by the Dalí biographer Ian Gibson during a TV show. However, an excerpt from an article from an Italian newspaper surfaced online in November 2011, including a reproduction of a copy of Lear's birth certificate, which states that she was born Alain Maurice Louis René Tap on 18 June 1939 in Saigon, and a picture of Lear before her transition.
It is believed she spent her early childhood in Switzerland. Raised speaking French and English, she learned German, Spanish and Italian in her teens, languages she later was able to use in her professional life. She relocated to Paris at the end of elementary school to study at Académie des Beaux-Arts, then went to Saint Martin's School of Art in London in 1964. On 11 December 1965, she married Paul Morgan Lear, a Scottish architecture student, and took his name. The name of the bride was registered at the Chelsea registry office as 'Amanda Tap daughter of André Tap, retired Captain of the French army'.
Discography
Main article: Amanda Lear discography
1977: I Am a Photograph
1978: Sweet Revenge
1979: Never Trust a Pretty Face
1980: Diamonds for Breakfast
1981: Incognito
1983: Tam-Tam
1985: A L
1987: Secret Passion
1989: Uomini più uomini
1990: Tant qu'il y aura des hommes
1993: Cadavrexquis
1995: Alter Ego
1998: Back in Your Arms
2001: Heart
2003: Tendance
2006: With Love
2009: Brief Encounters
2009: Brand New Love Affair
2012: I Don't Like Disco
2014: My Happiness
2016: Let Me Entertain You
Compilations
Main article: Amanda Lear discography
1982: Ieri, oggi
2005: Forever Glam!
2005: Sings Evergreens
2006: The Sphinx – Das Beste aus den Jahren 1976–1983
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