Amanda Lear

Amanda Lear (née Tap or Tapp; born 18 June or 18 November 1939, 1941, 1946 or 1950) 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 almost 20 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 star signed to Ariola Records, primarily impacting continental Europe and Scandinavia. 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, hosting 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 books, 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 the 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 in 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.

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 Alain-Philippe. 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, which 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 seemed to be the most credible, but Lear claimed origins in Singapore, Switzerland and even Transylvania. According to her book My Life with Dalí, she was 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 and that her surname at that time 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 stated that her father was British, her mother was Russian and that they both had died. However, Lear later stated in a 1978 interview that she had a younger brother, her mother was Mongolian and they were both living together in a small town in the Pyrenees on the French-Spanish border. 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 23 December 2000, summarized the information relating to these aspects of Lear's life as follows: