The story of Lady Gaga

A New York girl called Stefani

Lady Gaga was born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta on the twenty eighth of March 1986, at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. Her mother Cynthia and her father Joseph both have Italian roots, and they raised Stefani and her younger sister Natali in a Catholic household on the Upper West Side. Her parents came from working families and pushed hard for everything they had. Her father was a New Jersey boy and a huge Bruce Springsteen fan, and Thunder Road became a father and daughter song. He used to cry and dance with her to it, promising to chase her car down the street on her wedding day.[1] [2] [3]

Music came early. Stefani started piano at four, because her mother wanted her to become a cultured young woman, and she found she could learn songs by ear rather than from sheet music. From the age of eleven she went to the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private Catholic girls school on the Upper East Side. She later described her teenage self as studious and disciplined but insecure, a misfit who was mocked for being eccentric. She played open mic nights, took lead roles in school musicals like Guys and Dolls, and studied method acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. Her first screen appearance was as a face in the crowd in an AC DC music video in 2000.[1]

There was a family ghost in her story before she was even born. Her father's sister, Joanne Stefani Germanotta, died on the eighteenth of December 1974, at just nineteen, from complications of lupus. Stefani never met her, but she was given Joanne as a middle name, and she has called her aunt one of the most important figures in her life. Years later a poem Joanne had written would appear in the booklet of her first album, and she would name an entire record after her. She even tattooed the date of Joanne's death on her arm.[1] [2]

In 2003 she won early admission to CAP 21, a music programme at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She sharpened her writing with essays on art, religion and politics, including a thesis on the artists Spencer Tunick and Damien Hirst, and MusicBrainz records that she studied with the composer Ruth Schönthal in those years. But the classroom could not hold her. In 2005, in the middle of her second year, she dropped out to chase music full time. That same year she popped up as a restaurant customer on an MTV prank show called Boiling Points, one of a string of tiny parts that went nowhere.[1] [2]

The Lower East Side years

After leaving school, Stefani threw herself into the downtown scene. In 2005 she recorded two songs with the hip hop pioneer Melle Mel for a children's audiobook, and she formed the SGBand with friends from NYU, playing clubs on the Lower East Side. This period also held the darkest event of her life, though she kept it secret for years. In 2014 she revealed that at nineteen she had been raped by a music producer she said was about twenty years older than her. She has said she did not tell anyone for seven years, and that it took a great deal of physical and emotional therapy to heal.[1] [2] [3]

She has never named the man, and says she never will, because she does not want to face him again. In 2021, speaking on a mental health series made by Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry, she described a producer telling her to take her clothes off and threatening to burn all her music when she refused. She said she froze, that the assault left her pregnant, and that she was later dropped off on a street corner near her parents' home because she was sick and vomiting. In 2016 she said she lives with post traumatic stress disorder as a result, and years later she suffered what she called a total psychotic break.[1] [2] [3]

Her break in the business began in June 2006, at a songwriters showcase at a club called the Cutting Room. A talent scout named Wendy Starland saw her and recommended her to the producer Rob Fusari, who had worked on hits for Destiny's Child. In his New Jersey studio Fusari pushed her away from rock and toward dance beats, and the two began dating. They set up a company called Team Lovechild to promote her. Their demos reached Def Jam, which signed her in September 2006 and then dropped her three months later. The label's boss, L.A. Reid, later called it the biggest mistake of his life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dropped and heartbroken, she went further underground. She danced go go, played neo burlesque nights and met the performance artist Lady Starlight, who helped shape her stage persona. The pair ran a raucous show of pop songs and seventies glam records called Lady Gaga and the Starlight Revue, and they even played Lollapalooza in 2007. She later said this was also a time of drink and drugs, and credited the memory of her aunt Joanne with helping her pull back from addiction. Meanwhile she wrote songs for other artists through a publishing deal with Sony ATV, pitching material for Britney Spears, Fergie, New Kids on the Block and the Pussycat Dolls.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The deal that changed everything came in November 2007. Fusari sent her songs to the producer Vincent Herbert, who signed her to his new label Streamline, part of Interscope Records. Gaga later credited Herbert as the man who discovered her. At Interscope the singer Akon heard her sing a guide vocal for one of his tracks, was stunned, and persuaded label chief Jimmy Iovine to also sign her to his own label, calling her his franchise player. Herbert also introduced her to a young manager called Troy Carter, who was facing eviction from his home. For the next year the three of them drove around California, playing several clubs a night for little money.[1] [2] [3]

Just Dance and The Fame

By 2008 Gaga had moved to Los Angeles and built her own creative team, the Haus of Gaga, modelled on Andy Warhol's Factory. Working with the Swedish Moroccan producer RedOne, she wrote Just Dance, she said, in about ten minutes while badly hungover, on her first ever day in a big Hollywood studio. She later said that record saved her life. She had left New York so fast that her mother had to go and clear out her apartment for her. Akon was originally the featured voice, but that version was recalled from radio and replaced with one sung by his protégé Colby O'Donis.[1] [2] [3]

Just Dance came out in April 2008 and took its time. It was a sleeper hit, spending almost five months on the Billboard Hot 100 before finally reaching number one in January 2009. Her debut album, The Fame, was released on the nineteenth of August 2008, a glossy electropop record about the hunger for celebrity. Early radio found her too racy and too underground, and her first loyal audience was in gay clubs. One of her very first television performances was at the NewNowNext Awards on the LGBTQ channel Logo, and she later said the turning point for her career was the gay community.[1] [2] [3]

The second single, Poker Face, was even bigger. Gaga has said it was about her rock and roll boyfriends and about bisexuality, being with a man while thinking about a woman. It topped the charts in nearly every country where it was released and became the best selling single in the world in 2009, with nine point eight million copies. The Fame went to number one in Britain, Canada and Germany, and eventually sold more than fifteen million copies worldwide. At the Grammys in January 2010 it won Best Electronic Dance Album, and Poker Face won Best Dance Recording.[1] [2] [3]

Gaga opened for the Pussycat Dolls, then headlined her own Fame Ball Tour from March to September 2009, dedicating it to her aunt Joanne. She treated every television spot as performance art. At the MTV Video Music Awards in September 2009 she sang Paparazzi while appearing to bleed to death on stage, a moment still ranked among the best in the show's history. She played up the mystery of her persona so hard that rumours spread about her body and her gender. In February 2010 she won three Brit Awards on one night, including Best International Album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Fame Monster and the Monster Ball

On the road in 2009, Gaga wrote eight new songs about her fears, each one a different monster. Her label wanted just three new tracks for a reissue and suggested she release Boys Boys Boys as a single instead. She refused. The result was The Fame Monster, released in November 2009 as a standalone set and as part of a deluxe edition. Its lead single, Bad Romance, was written on her tour bus in Norway with RedOne. She premiered the finished version at Alexander McQueen's Paris fashion show in October 2009, which turned out to be his final collection.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bad Romance topped the charts in more than twenty countries and sold around twelve million copies. Its video, directed by Francis Lawrence, has Gaga kidnapped in a surreal white bathhouse and sold to the Russian mafia, before she sets fire to the man who bought her. It briefly became the most viewed video on YouTube, and in October 2010 Gaga became the first person to pass one billion total views on the site. Then came Telephone, a song she had originally written for Britney Spears. Recorded with Beyoncé, it became a crime caper video continuing the story from Paparazzi, with the pair poisoning a diner full of customers.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Her second tour was meant to be a joint bill with Kanye West called Fame Kills, but after West's outburst at the 2009 Video Music Awards it was cancelled. Gaga built her own show in a hurry, and The Monster Ball opened in November 2009. She rebuilt it from scratch after only a few months because she felt the first version was rushed. It ran until May 2011 and grossed more than two hundred and twenty seven million dollars, the biggest ever for a debut headliner. Its blood soaked staging caused outrage in Manchester in June 2010, the day after the Cumbria shootings, in which a taxi driver killed twelve people and then himself.[1] [2]

That year brought grief and legal trouble. On the eleventh of February 2010 her friend Alexander McQueen took his own life. Five days later, at the Brit Awards, she played a quiet piano version of Telephone in his memory. In March, Rob Fusari sued her for thirty point five million dollars, claiming he had been squeezed out of royalties and merchandise money. Her lawyers answered that his deal was unlawful because he had acted as an unlicensed employment agent. It was also in this era that Gaga said she had tested borderline positive for lupus, the illness that killed her aunt, though she said she had no symptoms.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The peak of this era came at the MTV Video Music Awards in September 2010. Gaga won eight awards, including Video of the Year for Bad Romance, and she brought four gay and lesbian former soldiers as her guests, to protest the military's ban on openly gay service members. To collect the top prize she changed into a dress made of raw flank steak, with matching boots, hat and purse, and joked with the presenter Cher about holding her meat purse. Animal rights groups were furious, but Time named it the fashion statement of the year. She said the message was that if we do not fight for our rights, we will have no more rights than the meat on our bones.[1] [2] [3]

Born This Way

Gaga wrote Born This Way on the road in England, in Liverpool and Manchester, and said it took about ten minutes. She wanted a freedom song for women, minorities and the LGBTQ community, in the spirit of early nineties empowerment pop, and she later said it was also inspired by Carl Bean's 1977 disco record I Was Born This Way. The single came out in February 2011, sold more than a million copies in five days, and became the one thousandth number one in the history of the Billboard Hot 100. At the Grammys that month she arrived on the red carpet carried inside a giant egg, and hatched out of it on stage.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The album followed on the twenty third of May 2011 and sold one point one million copies in its first week in America. Amazon helped by selling it for ninety nine cents for two days, losing more than three million dollars on the deal. The record mixed techno, heavy metal and Springsteen style rock, and Queen's Brian May played guitar on You and I. The single Judas angered religious groups. At the Video Music Awards in August she appeared in drag as her male alter ego, Jo Calderone, and delivered a lovesick monologue before singing You and I. While filming the You and I video she met the actor Taylor Kinney, and they started dating in July 2011.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In September 2011 a fourteen year old fan named Jamey Rodemeyer, who had been bullied for being gay, took his own life. Hours before, he had posted a goodbye message to her, calling her Mother Monster. Gaga called for bullying to be treated as a hate crime and went on to meet President Barack Obama about it. That year she was also ordained online as a minister, so that she could officiate the wedding of two female friends. In 2012 she and her mother Cynthia launched the Born This Way Foundation at Harvard University, with Oprah Winfrey among the speakers, to support young people's mental health.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Born This Way Ball began in April 2012 and ran into trouble across Asia. In the Philippines, religious groups called her song Judas blasphemous. In Indonesia, the hardline Islamic Defenders Front called her the devil's messenger and threatened violence if she got off the plane, and police refused a permit unless she toned the show down. She would not, and the Jakarta concert was cancelled. Then in February 2013 her body gave out. She had been hiding a torn labrum in her right hip, and the last twenty one dates were cancelled so she could have surgery. Refunds were estimated at twenty five million dollars.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Artpop, R. Kelly and the jazz reset

Recovering from hip surgery, Gaga spent months on her third album, Artpop, with a cover by the artist Jeff Koons showing a sculpture of her behind one of his blue gazing balls. She launched it in November 2013 at a warehouse party called ArtRave, where she showed off what she called the world's first flying dress. The lead single Applause reached the top five in America, but reviews for Artpop were mixed, and it sold about two and a half million copies, a sharp drop after Born This Way. Around this time she split with her longtime manager Troy Carter, and by mid 2014 she had signed with Bobby Campbell and Live Nation's management arm.[1] [2] [3]

The second single was Do What U Want, a duet with R. Kelly. They sang it together on Saturday Night Live and at the American Music Awards, and she shot a video with the photographer Terry Richardson in which Kelly played a doctor leaning over her sedated body. The video was never released, though footage leaked in 2014. Both men faced sexual misconduct accusations. In January 2019, after the documentary Surviving R. Kelly, Gaga said her judgement had been twisted and poor, and she had the song pulled from streaming services. Kelly was later convicted in 2021 and 2022 of a series of crimes including child sex offences, and received a combined sentence of thirty one years.[1] [2] [3]

Gaga has admitted she felt depressed in this period and thought about quitting music. One lifeline was Tony Bennett. They had first met in 2011, after she sang at a charity gala in New York, and recorded The Lady Is a Tramp for his duets album. In September 2014 they released a full album of jazz standards, Cheek to Cheek. It went to number one in America, making Bennett, then eighty eight, the oldest artist ever to top the album chart with new material, and it won a Grammy. Bennett called her the most talented artist he had ever met.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In December 2014, asked by Howard Stern about her song Swine, she first spoke publicly about being raped at nineteen. Two months later, in February 2015, she stunned the Oscars audience with a medley from The Sound of Music honouring Julie Andrews, and the same month she and Taylor Kinney got engaged. With the songwriter Diane Warren she co wrote Til It Happens to You for The Hunting Ground, a documentary about campus rape, earning an Oscar nomination. At the 2016 ceremony she performed it after an introduction by Vice President Joe Biden, joined on stage by fifty survivors of sexual assault.[1] [2] [3]

Joanne, the Super Bowl and chronic pain

Gaga had always wanted to act. In late 2015 she starred as a hotel owner called Elizabeth in American Horror Story: Hotel, and in January 2016 it won her a Golden Globe. That February she sang the Star Spangled Banner at Super Bowl 50 and led a David Bowie tribute at the Grammys. But in July 2016 her engagement to Taylor Kinney ended, and she later said her career had got in the way. She poured the heartbreak and her family history into her next album, recorded with the producer Mark Ronson at Rick Rubin's Shangri La studio in Malibu, and named it Joanne, after her late aunt.[1] [2]

Joanne came out on the twenty first of October 2016, a stripped back record of soft rock, country and Americana, promoted with a pink cowboy hat instead of wigs and costumes, and a small tour of dive bars. It went to number one, her fourth chart topping album in America. In December 2016 she revealed that she lives with post traumatic stress disorder. She also lost a dear friend, Sonja Durham, the managing director of the Haus of Gaga, who died of cancer in 2017. Durham had been married in Gaga's backyard, and the bonus track Grigio Girls was written for her.[1] [2] [3]

On the fifth of February 2017, Gaga headlined the Super Bowl fifty one halftime show in Houston. It opened with her on the roof of the stadium surrounded by three hundred lighted drones forming an American flag, the first time drones had appeared in a Super Bowl show. The rooftop part was prerecorded, and the idea of starting on the roof came from her sister. She then appeared to dive down to the stage and ran through her hits, including Born This Way, making a point of singing its verse naming gay, bi, lesbian and transgender lives. About one hundred and seventeen and a half million Americans watched, more than watched the game itself.[1] [2] [3]

That September the Netflix documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two showed her in constant physical pain, and she revealed the cause was fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition. She asked for the pain to be included so that others living with it would feel less alone. Days later she was hospitalised and pulled out of Rock in Rio, writing that it was not simply hip pain but severe pain. In February 2018 she cancelled the last ten shows of the Joanne World Tour, saying her medical team wanted her to recover at home. The film also showed her hurt that Madonna had criticised her in the press.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A Star Is Born and Shallow

Bradley Cooper had been searching for the lead in his remake of A Star Is Born. Beyoncé had been attached for a year, and Adele was briefly considered. Then Cooper saw Gaga sing Édith Piaf's La Vie en rose at a cancer charity event and said she demolished the room. He went to her house in Malibu, they sang together, and she was cast. She insisted that all the songs be sung live on camera rather than mimed, and concert scenes were filmed at real festivals such as Stagecoach, in front of real crowds. For the role she wore almost no makeup, covered her tattoos and dyed her hair back to its natural colour.[1] [2] [3]

The first single, Shallow, came out on the twenty seventh of September 2018. Gaga wrote it with Mark Ronson, Anthony Rossomando and Andrew Wyatt. In an early draft of the script Cooper's character died by drowning, which shaped the song's imagery of diving off the deep end, and it was first planned as an end credits song. Shallow topped the charts in America and Britain and around the world, and sold more than ten million copies in 2019 alone. That made Gaga the first woman with four singles to each pass ten million sales, after Just Dance, Poker Face and Bad Romance.[1] [2] [3]

Awards season in early 2019 was a clean sweep. Shallow won the Golden Globe, the Grammy, the BAFTA and finally the Oscar for Best Original Song, making Gaga the first person to win all four in the same year. At the Academy Awards on the twenty fourth of February 2019, she and Cooper walked from their seats to a single piano and sang it face to face, their faces touching by the end, a moment that set off endless speculation. Her real personal life was changing too. In October 2018 she had announced her engagement to the talent agent Christian Carino, but her representative confirmed the engagement was off just days before the Oscars.[1] [2] [3]

Meanwhile she opened a Las Vegas residency at the Park MGM in December 2018, with two shows. Enigma was a theatrical hits show, and Jazz and Piano paired Great American Songbook standards with stripped down versions of her own songs. At one of the Vegas shows in January 2019 she attacked Vice President Mike Pence over his wife teaching at a school that turned away LGBTQ people, calling herself a Christian woman who believes everyone is welcome. In September 2019 she launched a vegan makeup line, Haus Laboratories, the first beauty brand to launch exclusively on Amazon.[1] [2] [3]

Chromatica, a shooting and saying goodbye to Tony

Around New Year 2020 Gaga began a relationship with the tech investor Michael Polansky, and they went public at the Super Bowl in Miami that February. Her sixth album, Chromatica, arrived on the twenty ninth of May 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. It was a return to dance pop, built on early nineties house music, but the songs were about trauma and mental illness. She said openly that she had self harmed in the past, and called the album the start of her healing. Its duet with Ariana Grande, Rain on Me, became the first all female collaboration to debut at number one on the Hot 100, and it won a Grammy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In April 2020 she also curated One World: Together at Home, a televised benefit concert for the World Health Organization's pandemic fund that raised one hundred and twenty seven million dollars. In January 2021 she sang the Star Spangled Banner at Joe Biden's inauguration. A month later came a terrifying crime. On the twenty fourth of February 2021 her dog walker, Ryan Fischer, was attacked on a Hollywood street by men hunting for valuable French bulldogs. He was beaten, choked and shot in the chest, and two of her dogs, Koji and Gustav, were taken. A third dog, Miss Asia, ran away and was later found by police.[1] [2] [3]

Gaga, who was filming in Rome, offered a five hundred thousand dollar reward. Within a few days a woman brought the dogs, unharmed, to a Los Angeles police station. Police first said she was not involved, but in April 2021 she was among five people charged in the case. Detectives said the thieves did not know the dogs belonged to Gaga. The man who shot Fischer, James Howard Jackson, was mistakenly released from jail in April 2022 because of a clerical error, and in December 2022 he was sentenced to twenty one years in prison. Fischer survived, and described it as a very close call with death.[1] [2] [3]

In Ridley Scott's House of Gucci, released in November 2021, Gaga played Patrizia Reggiani, who was convicted of hiring a hitman to murder her former husband, Maurizio Gucci. She said she spoke in an Italian accent for months and stayed in character for a year and a half, and that by the end of filming a psychiatric nurse was on set to look after her. Her other great partner was fading. Tony Bennett had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2016, and he recorded their second album, Love for Sale, while at times lost and bewildered. It came out in September 2021 and won a Grammy.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Bennett's final concerts were with Gaga, at Radio City Music Hall on the third and fifth of August 2021, and his last televised performance was their MTV Unplugged special. He died on the twenty first of July 2023, aged ninety six. In 2022 she co wrote Hold My Hand for Top Gun: Maverick, which was nominated for an Oscar, and took the Chromatica Ball out as her first all stadium tour. She said she was able to perform without much of her fibromyalgia pain for the first time in ages. The twenty shows earned one hundred and twelve million dollars, and she was the highest grossing female touring artist of 2022.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Mayhem, a record crowd and a new family

In April 2024 Michael Polansky proposed after a day of rock climbing. Years earlier, when he asked how he should do it, she had told him he could just wrap a blade of grass around her finger, and that memory became the song Blade of Grass. In July she opened the Paris Olympics with a feathered cabaret number on the Seine, and in August she released Die with a Smile, a seventies style duet with Bruno Mars. It spent eighteen weeks at number one on the Billboard Global 200, won a Grammy, and became the most streamed song in the world in 2025, and the number one song of Billboard's year end Hot 100.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Not everything landed. In October 2024 she starred as Harleen Quinzel opposite Joaquin Phoenix in Joker: Folie à Deux, a musical sequel that bombed with critics and at the box office, grossing around two hundred and eight million dollars on a budget of about the same size. The pair even won a Razzie for worst screen combo, which Gaga later joked about while hosting Saturday Night Live. She channelled the character into a companion jazz album, Harlequin. Then, encouraged by Polansky to make the pop album her early fans loved, she released Mayhem on the seventh of March 2025. It debuted at number one, her seventh American chart topping album, powered by Disease and Abracadabra.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the third of May 2025 Gaga played a free concert on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, her first show in Brazil since 2012. Estimates of the crowd ran from two point one to two and a half million people, the biggest audience ever for a female artist. Only afterwards did the public learn that police had arrested two people hours before the show over an alleged plot to attack the crowd with improvised explosives and Molotov cocktails. Police said the group had posed online as her fans, the Little Monsters, and targeted LGBTQ people. Gaga's team said they learned of the threat from the news the next morning.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Mayhem Ball tour opened in Las Vegas on the sixteenth of July 2025, a gothic opera of a show that critics widely praised. It crossed Europe, Australia and Japan and closed at Madison Square Garden in her hometown on the thirteenth of April 2026, after roughly ninety five performances. Billboard reported that the tour earned the biggest six month gross in the history of its Boxscore chart, more than two hundred and thirty six million dollars. Along the way she played a ghost in the Netflix series Wednesday, and Tim Burton directed her video for The Dead Dance.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

At the Grammys in February 2026 Mayhem won Best Pop Vocal Album and Abracadabra won Best Dance Pop Recording. A week later she made a surprise appearance at Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show, singing a salsa version of Die with a Smile while a real couple got married on stage. Meryl Streep personally phoned her to ask for a cameo in The Devil Wears Prada 2, where Gaga plays a diva version of herself, and she wrote three songs for the film, including Runway with Doechii. As of 2026 she has won sixteen Grammys and sold an estimated one hundred and twenty four million records, and she is still reinventing herself.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga and Rob Fusari. The New Jersey producer worked with Stefani almost every day in 2006, pushed her from rock toward dance pop and co wrote early songs like Paparazzi. They dated from May 2006 to January 2007 and formed a company together. When her career exploded he sued her in 2010 for thirty point five million dollars, and a court separately ordered him to pay Wendy Starland, the scout who had actually found her.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lady Gaga and Lady Starlight. The DJ and performer Colleen Martin, known as Lady Starlight, met Gaga at a Manhattan party and became her partner in crime on the downtown scene. Together they ran a show mixing glam and metal records with Gaga's pop, lit hairspray on fire and go go danced, and played Lollapalooza in 2007. Starlight helped shape Gaga's early stage look and later opened several of her tours.[1] [2]

Lady Gaga and Troy Carter. Carter was a struggling manager facing eviction when Vincent Herbert introduced him to Gaga in 2007. He steered her through The Fame, The Fame Monster and Born This Way, sharing an Emmy nomination for her Monster Ball television special. They split around the release of Artpop, citing creative differences, and she moved to Bobby Campbell and Live Nation.[1] [2] [3]

Lady Gaga and RedOne. The Swedish Moroccan producer Nadir Khayat co wrote and produced the songs that made her, from Just Dance and Poker Face to Bad Romance. Their partnership began in 2007 through a shared management company, and he kept working with her on Born This Way and even early sessions for Joanne.[1] [2] [3]

Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett. They met in 2011 after she sang at a charity gala, and the veteran crooner, sixty years her senior, became her musical mentor and close friend. They made two number one jazz albums together, Cheek to Cheek and Love for Sale, and his final concerts in 2021 were with her. Bennett, who had Alzheimer's disease, died in July 2023.[1] [2] [3]

Lady Gaga and Taylor Kinney. The Chicago Fire actor played her love interest in the You and I video in 2011, and they started dating soon after. They got engaged in February 2015, but called it off in July 2016. Gaga later said her career had interfered, and the breakup runs through Joanne and the documentary Five Foot Two.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lady Gaga and Michael Polansky. A Harvard trained entrepreneur who runs Sean Parker's foundation, Polansky began dating Gaga around New Year 2020. He urged her to make a joyful pop record, co produced Harlequin and Mayhem, co wrote songs like Blade of Grass and helped shape the Mayhem Ball. He proposed in April 2024 after a day of rock climbing.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper. Cooper cast her in A Star Is Born after seeing her sing La Vie en rose at a cancer benefit, and they co wrote and produced most of the soundtrack together. Their duet Shallow won the Oscar, and their intimate performance at the 2019 ceremony fuelled huge public speculation about a romance. At the time Cooper was in a relationship with the model Irina Shayk, the mother of his daughter.[1] [2] [3]

Lady Gaga and Madonna. Gaga grew up idolising Madonna and was constantly compared to her. The relationship soured when Madonna called Born This Way reductive in 2012 and mocked it on tour. In Five Foot Two, Gaga says she still admires Madonna but was hurt to be criticised through the press.[1] [2] [3]

Lady Gaga and R. Kelly. Gaga chose Kelly for the 2013 duet Do What U Want, calling him the king of R&B, and defended the collaboration at first. After Surviving R. Kelly aired in 2019 she said her judgement had been poor and had the song removed from streaming services. Kelly was later convicted of sex crimes and jailed.[1] [2] [3]

Lady Gaga and Perez Hilton. The gossip blogger was an early champion of Gaga, but the friendship collapsed. In 2013 she said that after her hip injury he sent her a picture of a wheelchair marked Karma, and she accused him of stalking her when he was seen in her New York apartment building. Hilton denied it, saying he had been apartment hunting.[1]

Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars. Mars had been sitting on an unfinished song since 2021 and played it to Gaga in 2024. They finished Die with a Smile the same day, singing into the early hours, and it became one of the most streamed songs ever, winning a Grammy and spending eighteen weeks at number one globally.[1]

Rare facts about Lady Gaga

• As a teenager, Stefani appeared as a background extra in an episode of The Sopranos. In 2001 she had a tiny role as a high school student in The Sopranos episode The Telltale Moozadell. Interest in the scene exploded when the clip surfaced online in 2010.[1]
• Her very first screen appearance was as a face in the crowd in an AC DC music video. In 2000, while still at school, she appeared in the background of the video for AC DC's Stiff Upper Lip, years before anyone knew her name.[1]
• At NYU she wrote a thesis on the artists Spencer Tunick and Damien Hirst. At the Collaborative Arts Project 21 programme at NYU's Tisch School, she wrote essays on art, religion and politics, including a thesis on the photographer Spencer Tunick and the artist Damien Hirst.[1]
• In 2005 she recorded two songs with hip hop pioneer Melle Mel for a children's audiobook. The songs accompanied Cricket Casey's children's novel The Portal in the Park, one of her first professional recordings before the name Lady Gaga existed.[1]
• The Fame's booklet includes a poem written by her late aunt Joanne. The poem, For a Moment, was written by Joanne Germanotta, who died of lupus complications at nineteen in 1974. Gaga's parents later opened a New York restaurant named Joanne Trattoria.[1]
• The opening word of Just Dance is RedOne, the producer's name, often misheard as red wine. Many listeners assumed Gaga was singing about red wine at the start of Just Dance, but she is actually calling out her producer RedOne, a signature tag.[1]
• The stuttering hook of Poker Face nods to Boney M's 1977 hit Ma Baker. According to the BBC, the famous mum mum mum mah hook references the Boney M disco hit Ma Baker, a playful borrowing from seventies Europop.[1] [2]
• Her label wanted Boys Boys Boys as her next single, but she insisted on writing new songs instead. Instead of stretching The Fame with another single, Gaga refused and wrote the eight songs that became The Fame Monster, including Bad Romance.[1]
• A limited edition of The Fame Monster came with a lock of hair from one of her wigs. The super deluxe edition, released in December 2009, included extra merchandise, among it a lock from Gaga's wig.[1]
• Interscope first rejected the brunette cover of The Fame Monster as too dark. Two covers were shot by Hedi Slimane. The label balked at the gothic brunette one, but Gaga argued the two formed a yin and yang pair and won.[1]
• The Monster Ball began life as a joint tour with Kanye West called Fame Kills. The co headlining tour was scheduled to start in Phoenix in November 2009 but was cancelled after West's outburst at the Video Music Awards, and Gaga built The Monster Ball instead.[1]
• The meat dress was made of flank steak from the designer's family butcher. Designer Franc Fernandez built it in about a week and Gaga had to be stitched into it backstage. They never had a fitting.[1]
• The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame paid a taxidermist six thousand dollars to preserve the meat dress. It had already begun to decompose. It was treated with chemicals, turned into a kind of jerky and dyed red to look fresh again.[1]
• The Telephone video earned a Guinness World Record for the most product placement in a music video. The Tarantino style short film with Beyoncé was packed with brand appearances, which won it a place in Guinness World Records.[1] [2]
• Born This Way was the one thousandth number one single in Hot 100 history. It debuted at the top in February 2011 and stayed there for six weeks, landing the milestone spot on a chart that began in 1958.[1] [2]
• Amazon lost more than three million dollars selling Born This Way for ninety nine cents. In the album's first week, Amazon sold an estimated four hundred and forty thousand copies at that price over two days, helping it past one million.[1]
• Her Grammy egg grew out of a stylist's joke about shoes shaped like eggs. Gaga sent Nicola Formichetti a picture of an embryo. He imagined egg shaped shoes, she pushed it further, and designer Hussein Chalayan built the vessel she arrived in at the 2011 Grammys.[1]
• A parasitic wasp discovered in Thailand is named Aleiodes gaga in her honour. The tiny five millimetre wasp was described in 2012, and a genus of ferns called Gaga was also named after her.[1] [2]
• The city of Taichung in Taiwan marks the third of July as Lady Gaga Day. The date honours her first visit to Taiwan, in 2011.[1]
• In 2011, one hundred and twenty one Gaga impersonators gathered at the Grammys, setting a Guinness record. It was recognised as the largest gathering of Lady Gaga impersonators ever recorded.[1]
• Barack Obama said meeting Gaga in sixteen inch heels was intimidating. At a Human Rights Campaign fundraiser she towered over everyone, making her the tallest woman in the room.[1]
• China reportedly banned her music in 2016 after she met the Dalai Lama. After a public conversation with the Dalai Lama in Indianapolis, Chinese authorities reportedly added her to a list of hostile foreign forces.[1] [2]
• The famous rooftop drone opening of her 2017 Super Bowl halftime show was prerecorded. Three hundred drones formed a flag behind her, the first drones in a Super Bowl show, and the idea of starting on the roof came from her sister Natali.[1]
• The Super Bowl halftime show drew more US viewers than the game itself. About one hundred and seventeen and a half million Americans watched her halftime set, compared with one hundred and eleven million for the game.[1] [2]
• Shallow was first meant to play over the end credits of A Star Is Born. An early script had Cooper's character drowning, which inspired its diving imagery. When the script changed, it became the film's central love song.[1]
• Every song in A Star Is Born was sung live on set, at Gaga's insistence. The team recorded vocals live, sometimes with up to sixty one audio tracks, while the band played along to playback at real festivals.[1] [2]
• Haus Laboratories was the first beauty brand to launch exclusively on Amazon. Gaga said Amazon was the only partner that would accept her self acceptance message. The brand later moved to Sephora as Haus Labs.[1]
• In 2021 she designed a sculpture for Dom Pérignon that raised five hundred and seventy thousand dollars for her foundation. One hundred and ten limited bottles of rosé with her sculpture were sold privately, with profits going to the Born This Way Foundation.[1]
• She and Joaquin Phoenix won a Razzie for worst screen combo for Joker: Folie à Deux. Gaga joked on Saturday Night Live that the Razzie brought her closer to an EGORT, like an EGOT but hurtful.[1] [2]
• Bruno Mars once considered pitching Die with a Smile for Gaga's Joker project. Songwriter James Fauntleroy said Mars thought of offering an early version for Joker: Folie à Deux or Harlequin before it became their duet.[1]
• Abracadabra credits members of Siouxsie and the Banshees as songwriters. The track incorporates elements of the band's 1981 single Spellbound, so its members share writing credit.[1]
• For her Paris Olympics performance, Gaga rented pom poms from the famous Lido cabaret. She sang Zizi Jeanmaire's Mon truc en plumes on the Seine, with custom Dior costumes, in a tribute to French cabaret.[1]
• Meryl Streep got Gaga's number from a mutual friend and called her herself for The Devil Wears Prada 2. They had hit it off at SNL's fiftieth anniversary show. Gaga agreed on the spot and flew in from her world tour to film in Milan.[1]
• The Rio bomb plot was code named Operation Fake Monster. Police named it after the suspects' tactic of posing online as Little Monsters, her fans, to recruit people for the planned attack.[1]
• She played the Mayhem Ball show about ninety five times, by her own count. At the final show at Madison Square Garden in April 2026 she said it was strange to say goodbye to a show she had done ninety five times, not counting rehearsals.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.