Amanda Lear (French pronunciation: [amɑ̃da liʁ]; née Tap or Tapp) 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 conflicting information about her background and maintaining privacy regarding her family life, including her actual birth date even from her long-term husband Alain-Philippe. Contested facts include her birth date and place, her sex assigned at birth, the 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 (including GEMA) to be her birth date. 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:
Lear's background remains a mystery. She has variously let it be known that her mother was English or French or Vietnamese or Chinese, and that her father was English, Russian, French or Indonesian. She may have been born in Hanoi in 1939, or Hong Kong in either 1941 or 1946. Once she said she was from Transylvania. And to this day, it is a matter of conjecture as to whether she was born a boy or a girl.
1965–1974: Modelling and the Swinging London period
Amanda Lear was introduced to the eccentric Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí in Paris. She has since described their close and unconventional relationship as a "spiritual marriage" and remained Dalí's confidante, protégée and closest friend through the next 16 years. She spent every summer with Dalí at his home at Port Lligat in Catalonia, Spain, and accompanied him and his wife on trips to Barcelona, Madrid, Paris and New York. She also took part in his art projects, posing for a number of Dalí's drawings and paintings, including Angélus de Millet - Amanda (1968), Roger Freeing Angelica (St. George and the Damsel) (1970), Bateau Anthotropic (1971), and Exploding Head (1982). Dalí and Lear would later collaborate on a giant seven-foot-wide by four-foot-high collage fan. Lear can be found as Temperance in Salvador Dali's Tarot, in which she claimed to have assisted Dalí in the completion of the collages.
In 1965, Lear moved to London and began working as a cabaret artist. A July 1965 newspaper report about a robbery at her home described her as the strip-tease artist "Amanda Tapp, professionally known as Peki d'Oslo". An American newspaper described her in October 1965 as "one of the leading stripping stars on the European cabaret circuit".
On 11 December 1965 in the UK, she married Morgan Paul Lear, an architecture student, and adopted his name. After showing up at Lucie Daouphars' Parisian model school (known as Lucky), she was sent by Gérald Nanty to Karl Lagerfeld, then model maker at Patou. Amanda Lear was a runway model for Lagerfeld and met Catherine Harlé, the head of a modelling agency, who offered her a contract. With her modelling assignment, she walked for rising star Paco Rabanne in 1967. Just as Harlé had predicted, her looks were very much in demand. Soon after her debut Lear was photographed by Helmut Newton, Charles Paul Wilp and Antoine Giacomoni for magazines such as Beau (1966), mr. (1966), Le Nouveau Candide, Cinémonde (1967), Scandal, Marie France, Nova, The Daily Telegraph, Stern, Bravo and Vogue. She modelled for fashion designers including Yves Saint Laurent and Coco Chanel in Paris and Mary Quant, Ossie Clark and Antony Price in London. After some time, Lear dropped out of art school to model full-time and went on to lead a bohemian and flamboyant life in the Swinging London of the 1960s. Lear's acquaintances included the Beatles and fellow top models Twiggy, Pattie Boyd and Anita Pallenberg. In late 1966, she began dating the Rolling Stones' Brian Jones, whom she first met prior through Tara Browne. Pallenberg, cited as "Jones' mistress", also connected Lear with him. Their relationship inspired Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for the track "Miss Amanda Jones" from Between the Buttons, alluding the romance between Jones and Lear as she's described as "Ms. Jones". She became a "stalwart of London's demimonde", an exotic name on the nightclub circuit and a regular fixture in the gossip columns. Lear was arrested in 1967 by the police with drugs belonging to the Rolling Stones. Lear was sent naked to a prison cell "because you don't denounce a Rolling Stones", she said and was later fined for it. Lear appeared in several advertisements for major brands, modelling among others for a Chantelle underwear range and the Detchema fragrance by a French company Révillon Frères in 1967, and in 1968 played a minor role in the French comedy film Ne jouez pas avec les Martiens and also in the 1968 British psychedelic film Wonderwall. After Jones' death, Lear moved with hippie friends to Elvaston Place, South Kensington, in London. Lear recalled: "We smoked joints, took LSD, Jimi Hendrix came by when he had no place to sleep." In New York, Lear became a fixture at Max's Kansas City, partying every night with Andy Warhol and friends, to the point of neglecting some of her modelling duties, saying: "Do you even think I could have been ready and spotless by 8 A.M. as they wanted me to be ?"