Amanda Lear (; born 1939) is a French singer, songwriter, painter, television presenter, actress, and former model.
She began her professional career as a fashion model in the mid-1960s, and went on to model for Paco Rabanne, Ossie Clark, and others. She met Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, and remained 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 of European charts, including the best-selling Sweet Revenge (1978). Her bigger hits included "Blood and Honey", "Tomorrow", "Queen of Chinatown", "Follow Me", "Enigma (Give a Bit of Mmh to Me)", "The Sphinx", and "Fashion Pack".
By the mid-1980s, Lear had become a leading media personality in Italy, where she hosted many popular TV shows. Although television took priority over musical activity, she continued to record, experimenting with different genres and trying to revive her career by re-recording and remixing earlier hits to various levels of success. Lear has also developed a successful career in painting, which she has long described as her biggest passion, and regularly exhibited her works in galleries across Europe and beyond since the early 1980s. She has also written a number of autobiographies, including My Life with Dalí.
Since the 1990s, her time has been divided among music, television, movies, and painting. Despite regular album releases, she failed to achieve major success in charts with her music, but her television career has remained stellar, and she has hosted numerous primetime TV shows, mostly in Italy and France, occasionally making guest appearances in TV series. She has performed acting and dubbing roles in independent, as well as major, film productions. In the late 2000s, Lear reinvented herself as a theatrical actress, performing in long-running stage plays in France. To date, she allegedly has sold over 27 million records worldwide. Lear is also a widely recognized gay icon.
Early life
Lear's origins are unclear, with the singer providing different information about her background and keeping her birth year a secret from her long-term husband. Contested facts include her birth date and place, the gender she was assigned at birth, names and nationalities of her parents, and the location of her upbringing. Most sources claim 18 June 1939, including Bibliothèque nationale de France or 18 November 1939 to be her birth date, including GEMA. Her birth year, though, has variously been given as 1941, 1946, and 1950. During a 2010 interview with French newspaper Libération, Lear presented her identity card to the journalist, and it read: "born 18 November 1950 in Saigon". Georges Claude Guilbert claims, "Most biographers believe she was born in 1939, whatever she might declare to the contrary."
As for her birthplace, Saigon and British Hong Kong appear to be most credible versions, but places like Singapore, Switzerland, and even Transylvania have been rumoured as the singer's birthplace. She was reportedly the only child of her parents, who later divorced. Most sources, including Lear's 1965 wedding certificate from the Chelsea registry office, confirm that her father was a French army officer. Her mother was a Russian. According to the General Register Office for England and Wales, her birth surname was Tap. According to the French Republic, her birth surname was Tapp. 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 both had died. However, she later claimed that her mother had a French background. In 2021, she confirmed she was born in Saigon.
Lear allegedly grew up in the South of France and in Switzerland, or between London and Paris, or in Nice. She learned English, German, Spanish, and Italian in her teens, and would use multilingualism in her professional life. The academic Georges Claude Guilbert claims, "Linguists observe that she has a French accent when she speaks (and sings) in English".
The Guardian, on 24 December 2000, summarized the information relating to these aspects of Lear's life as follows: