Lady Gaga was born Stefani Germanotta. Young Stefani first learned to play piano by ear at the age of four (so she claims) and wrote her first piano ballad at the age of 13.
Gaga's Italian-American father, Joe Germanotta, started a company called Guest WiFi in 2002 that installed wireless internet access in hotels. He was quite a pioneer - this was the dark ages of hotel WiFi!
Joe eventually got out of the WiFi game to run his daughter's publishing company, House of Gaga. Her 2009 song "
Speechless" is about him; it's a plea for him to seek the medical treatment for a longstanding heart condition, which he did, undergoing open-heart surgery weeks before the song was released.
She attended Convent of the Sacred Heart, the same private Manhattan Catholic school that Nicky and Paris Hilton attended. Gaga went on to study music at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts at age 17 but dropped out to pursue her music career.
In 2001, when she was 15, she had a non-speaking role as "Girl at Swimming Pool #2" in the "The Telltale Moozadell" episode of
The Sopranos. In 2005 she showed up in the
MTV reality show Boiling Points.
Gaga started performing as a burlesque dancer after dropping out of college. She originally made a name for herself playing gigs at downtown Manhattan clubs with a performance art show billed as "Lady Gaga and the Starlight Revue" (with performance artist Lady Starlight) that ran from April 2007 to February 2008. This was when music industry insiders started to take note.
Before becoming an internationally famous star, Gaga was an apprentice songwriter under an internship at Famous Music Publishing. After the company was acquired by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, Gaga struck a music publishing and was hired to write songs for Britney Spears, New Kids On The Block and the Pussycat Dolls. Those songs all ended up as album cuts, released in 2008 around the same time as her debut album,
The Fame. The song she wrote for Spears is called "
Quicksand" and is a bonus track on her album
Circus.
Gaga's debut single was "
Just Dance." It was a slow mover, initially becoming a club hit before debuting on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in August 2008, and finally reaching #1 in January 2009. The song brought a techno-synth sound to America that had already been popular in Europe for years.
Most of her early hits were cowritten and produced by RedOne (born Nadir Khayat). The first song they wrote together was "
Boys Boys Boys."
As Gaga's star rose, RedOne became one of the hottest producers in the game, helming hits like "
On The Floor" for Jennifer Lopez and "
Fire Burning" for Sean Kingston.
Gaga refers to her fans as her "little monsters." In dedication, she had that inscription tattooed on her left arm. She is very protective of her "little monsters" and once purchased $1,000 worth of pizza for fans who had camped out overnight before a CD signing session.
Gaga admits to being an exhibitionist from an early age. One of her attention-commanding entrances was at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards where she wore a
dress made from raw meat (the dress was named
Time magazine's Fashion Statement of the year).
At the 2011 Grammy Awards she
incubated in an egg from which she hatched to perform "
Born This Way.
Lady Gaga is a gay rights advocate and attributes much of her early success to her gay fanbase. She stated that her song "
Poker Face" is about her experience with bisexuality.
She was influenced by flamboyant glam rockers such as Freddie Mercury, and she took her stage name from the Queen song "
Radio Ga Ga. The moniker came about after her producer, Rob Fusari, tried to type the words "Radio Gaga" into his mobile, but when Stefani received the message, it auto-corrected to "Lady Gaga." Fusari said, "After that day, she was Lady Gaga. She's like, 'Don't ever call me Stefani again.'"
Gaga is a natural brunette; she reportedly bleached her hair blonde because she was once mistaken for Amy Winehouse.
She has a lot of tattoos, which for a while she restricted to the left side of her body because her father asked her to stay "normal" on one side, but she later used the right side as a canvas as well. Among her tats are a peace symbol which was inspired by John Lennon and a quote in German by her favorite philosopher, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
Gaga loves heavy metal and admits to unwinding to AC/DC. Asked by the British magazine NME to recommend some music, she went for Australian rock act Airbourne because, "I swear to you they sound just like AC/Dc and the songwriting is just as good."
Gaga is a healthy eater, avoiding bread and eating lots of vegetables and lean proteins.
Her second album,
The Fame Monster, was released in November 2009 and became one of the best-selling albums of 2010. Hits from the album include "
Bad Romance" and "
Telephone."
Stefani Germanotta is committed to being Lady Gaga 24 hours a day. She told NME: "If you look at every single interview, every single television appearance, every single performance of my life, it's been devoted to who I am. Devoted to my identity, devoted to my craft. And if that isn't f---ing art I don't know what is."
Diagnosed in February 2013 with synovitis, which is severe inflammation of the joints, Gaga was forced to cancel the remaining dates of her Born This Way Ball tour and go to the hospital for hip surgery. She was later seen being wheeled about in a 24-Karat gold wheelchair custom-made by New York-based stylist Ken Borochov.
Asked by Harper's Bazaar what she would like written on her gravestone, Gaga replied: "She spread love with every invention."
Gaga played the 2017 Super Bowl halftime show. Her set was watched by 117.5 million viewers, the second-most viewed halftime show to that point, trailing behind Katy Perry's 2015 appearance, which drew in 120.7 million viewers.
Lady Gaga starred as a struggling singer named Ally in Bradley Cooper's 2018 movie A Star Is Born, a remake of the 1937 film of the same name.
The A Star Is Born soundtrack features vocal performances from Gaga and Cooper. It debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200 chart, making Gaga the first woman to have five chart-topping albums in the 2010s.
In her 2017 documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two, she said she lives with a condition called fibromyalgia, which leaves her in constant head-to-toe pain. She blames her illness on PTSD caused by a sexual assault by a music producer at the age of 19, and on breaking her hip in 2013. In 2024 she said she was pain-free, crediting her fiancé Michael Polansky with helping her recover.
