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Uploaded: June 3, 2008 at 3:45 am
Author: DJHazElCuban00
Length: 03:30
Rating: 5.00
Views: 2507
Amanda Lear (born November 18, 1946) is a model, adult model, polyglot, painter, novelist, actress, media personality, composer, lyricist, singer and gay icon who was a Disco Queen in Continental Europe, the Eastern Bloc and most other parts of the world in the mid 1970s to the early 1980s. She first came to the public's attention as the fetishistically clad model on the cover of Roxy Music's album For Your Pleasure in 1973. Lear was allegedly born Amanda Tapp, supposedly on November 18, reputedly in Hong Kong (Saigon) According to Lear herself, she was born to a British Naval officer on leave in Hong Kong and a mother of Mongolian-Chinese origin. Soon after her birth, her parents separated and Lear was raised by her mother in Nice, in the south of France. In addition to having two mother tongues by birth, French and English, she showed a talent for languages at an early age and also learnt German, Spanish and Italian in her teens, which she used later in her professional life. At the age of sixteen, she relocated to Paris to study at L'Academie des Beaux Arts before joining St. Martins School of Art in London in 1964. (Confessions Orbitales, Radio Europe 1, 2003) The truth about Lear's date of birth, the names and nationalities of her parents and the location of her upbringing has however been a matter of speculation and debate in France, Germany and Italy since the early 1980s. All through her career, Lear has deliberately made a point of providing the media with different, contradictory accounts of her early life; her mother's origin has previously been English, French, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Russian and/or Chinese. Her father has been at times English, Russian, French and Indonesian, sometimes serving in the British Navy, other times the French. Her place of birth has been reported as Switzerland, Hanoi, Saigon as well as Hong Kong and her date of birth from 1939 to 1946. In 1965, Lear was spotted by legendary French modelling agent Cathérine Harlé and, eager to find a way to finance her studies, she returned to Paris to catwalk for rising star Paco Rabanne. Soon thereafter, she found herself being photographed for magazines like Elle, Marie France and Vogue and modelling for fashion designers like Mary Quant, Ossie Clark, Antony Price, Yves Saint Laurent and Coco Chanel. After some time, she dropped out of art school, began modelling full-time and went on to lead a bohemian and flamboyant life in the Swinging London of the Sixties, hobnobbing with the rich and famous like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, Brian Eno, Twiggy, Sacha Distel, David Bailey, Yul Brynner and Keith Moon. While clubbing with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and her then boyfriend, the Guinness heir Tara Browne, in a Parisian nightspot named Le Castel in 1965, she was introduced to a man that was to change her life - on many levels according to some - none other than Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalì (1904-1989) who instantly saw a kindred spirit in her. Lear's biography My Life With Dali, which was first published in 1986 and had Dalí's approval, gives a detailed and intriguing insight into the lives of both the great genius and his muse. She accompanied him and his wife on trips to Barcelona, Madrid, New York and Paris and spent every summer with Dali at his home in Cadaqués in Catalonia. Dali served as a mentor to her; travelling with him, Lear discovered the great museums of Europe, Parisian salons and restaurants, New York bohemia and his homeland, Spain, while she, in return, introduced him to the younger generation of the counterculture in art, fashion, photography and music in London. The factual accuracy of My Life With Dalì is however disputed by many researchers of Dalì's life and work. Although she remained Dali's confidante, protegée and mistress all through the Sixties and Seventies, Lear was also romantically linked to Brian Jones, had a year-long affair with the married David Bowie and was briefly engaged to Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music but in 1979 she married French aristocrat Alain-Philippe Malagnac d'Argens de Villèle who, in fact, was the former lover turned adopted son of controversial gay novelist Roger Peyrefitte.