Lady Gaga

• 1. Introduction

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  Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was born on the 28th of March, 1986, at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She would grow up to sell an estimated 124 million records worldwide, become the first woman to hold the record for the most-attended concert in history, and win an Academy Award, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and a Grammy in the same year. But the name on those trophies would not be Stefani Germanotta. It would be Lady Gaga.

  How does a girl from the Upper West Side who was mocked for being "too provocative" and "too eccentric" become one of the best-selling music artists of all time? How does she go from playing open mic nights as a teenager to headlining the Super Bowl halftime show with a fleet of lighted drones overhead? And how does she stay at the top of global charts across three different decades?

  The answers involve a talent scout in a New York club, a spell-checker that changed one word, a friendship with an older jazz legend, a role in a horror anthology, and a concert on Copacabana Beach that drew an estimated audience of between 2.1 and 2.5 million people. They also involve real and lasting pain: a sexual assault, a chronic illness, years of self-reinvention, and a deep commitment to the young people who found themselves in her music when the world had not yet found them.

• 2. A Natural Musician

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  Gaga's mother insisted she become "a cultured young woman" and started her on piano lessons at age four. By her own account, she was propping herself up at the keys even earlier, before she was tall enough to reach them properly. Those early lessons gave her something that shaped everything that followed: she learned to learn music entirely by ear, preferring sound over notation.

  By the time she reached the Convent of the Sacred Heart, the private all-girls Catholic school on the Upper East Side she attended from age eleven, she had a clear sense of who she was musically, even if socially she described herself as "a bit insecure" and felt like a misfit. She played Adelaide in Guys and Dolls and Philia in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at Regis High School, and studied method acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute for ten years.

  Her screen debut came as a background presence in the 2000 music video for AC/DC's "Stiff Upper Lip". A year later, she appeared in a small role as a high school student in a 2001 episode of The Sopranos called "The Telltale Moozadell". That clip resurfaced online in 2010, reigniting fan interest years after it first aired.

  In 2003, she gained early admission to Collaborative Arts Project 21, the music school at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. There she sharpened her songwriting by writing essays on art, religion, social issues, and politics, including a thesis on pop artists Spencer Tunick and Damien Hirst. Two years later, she withdrew during the second semester of her second year to focus on her music career. The formal education was over. The real education was just beginning.

• 3. The Name and the Deal

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  After the 2006 Songwriters Hall of Fame New Songwriters Showcase at New York's Cutting Room, a talent scout named Wendy Starland brought Gaga to the attention of music producer Rob Fusari. He traveled daily to New Jersey to work with her, developing her songs and composing new material. Fusari later claimed to be the first person to call her "Lady Gaga", a name derived from Queen's "Radio Ga Ga". His account holds that it happened by accident: he tried to text her "Radio Ga Ga" but the spell checker autocorrected "Radio" to "Lady".

  The two built a company called Team Lovechild, LLC to promote her career, recording and sending electropop tracks to music industry executives. Joshua Sarubin, head of A&R at Def Jam Recordings, responded positively. With approval from Sarubin's boss Antonio "L.A." Reid, Gaga signed to Def Jam in September 2006. Three months later, the label dropped her, a decision Reid would later call "the biggest mistake I ever made in my life."

  Free from the label, Gaga began performing at neo-burlesque shows, which she described as a form of freedom. She met performance artist Lady Starlight, who helped shape her onstage persona. Together they performed their live piece, "Lady Gaga and the Starlight Revue", at venues like the Mercury Lounge, the Bitter End, and the Rockwood Music Hall, billed as "The Ultimate Pop Burlesque Rockshow" in tribute to 1970s variety acts. They performed at the 2007 Lollapalooza festival.

  Producer Vincent Herbert signed her to Streamline Records, an Interscope imprint, in November 2007. Gaga later credited Herbert as the man who discovered her. An internship at Famous Music Publishing led to a deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which put her to work writing songs for Britney Spears, New Kids on the Block, Fergie, and the Pussycat Dolls. Then, in the studio at Interscope, musician Akon heard her sing a reference vocal and was so impressed that he convinced Jimmy Iovine to form a joint deal, making her his "franchise player" on his KonLive Distribution label. By late 2007, she had signed with Cherrytree Records as well and collaborated with producer and songwriter RedOne for a week on her debut album.

• 4. The Fame and Its Monsters

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  The Fame was released on the 19th of August, 2008. It reached number one in Austria, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, and the UK, and cracked the top five in Australia and the United States. The first two singles, "Just Dance" and "Poker Face", hit number one in all four of those countries. "Poker Face" went on to become the world's best-selling single of 2009, with 9.8 million copies sold that year, and spent a record 83 weeks on Billboard's Digital Songs chart.

  To write the follow-up, Gaga spent a year traveling the world on her Fame Ball Tour, which ran from March to September 2009. From that tour she wrote eight songs that became The Fame Monster, a reissue released as a standalone EP on the 18th of November, 2009. Its first single, "Bad Romance", became the most watched video on YouTube in April 2010. That October, Gaga became the first person to accumulate more than one billion combined views on the platform.

  At the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards, she won eight awards from 13 nominations, including Video of the Year for "Bad Romance". She was the first woman to receive two Video of the Year nominations in the same year at a single ceremony. The video for "Bad Romance" later appeared on Rolling Stone's list of the "100 Greatest Music Videos of All Time" in 2021.

  In 2009, she spent a record 150 weeks on the UK Singles Chart and became the most downloaded female act in a year in the United States, with 11.1 million downloads, earning her entry in the Guinness Book of World Records. The Monster Ball Tour, which ran from November 2009 to May 2011, grossed $227.4 million. That figure made it the highest-grossing concert tour for a debut headlining artist. Concerts at Madison Square Garden were filmed for an HBO special, and the era closed with Gaga testing borderline positive for lupus while insisting she was not yet affected by symptoms.

• 5. Born This Way and the Jazz Detour

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  "Born This Way", released in February 2011, sold more than one million copies within five days and earned the Guinness World Record for the fastest-selling single on iTunes. It debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the chart's 1,000th number-one single. The album followed on the 23rd of May, 2011, selling 1.1 million copies in its first week in the United States. Rolling Stone would later place it among "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" in 2020.

  Filming the music video for the album's single "You and I" led to something unexpected: Gaga met actor Taylor Kinney in July 2011, as he played her love interest. The Born This Way Ball tour, which began in April 2012, ended a month early when a labral tear in her right hip required surgery. While refunds were estimated at $25 million, the tour had grossed $183.9 million globally.

  The jazz turn began not with a label directive but with a friendship. Gaga worked with Tony Bennett on a jazz version of "The Lady Is a Tramp" in 2011, and from that collaboration came Cheek to Cheek, their full collaborative album released in September 2014. Bennett stated that Gaga is "the most talented artist I have ever met". The record became Gaga's third consecutive number-one album on the Billboard 200 and won the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album.

  Sandwiched between those two milestones was Artpop, released on the 6th of November, 2013, a record Gaga crafted to mirror "a night at the club". It debuted atop the Billboard 200. Helen Brown of The Daily Telegraph criticized it for revisiting familiar themes but found it "great for dancing". To support the album, Gaga had a seven-day concert residency at New York's Roseland Ballroom in March 2014, marking the venue's final performances before its closure.

• 6. Actress, Activist, Performer

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  Gaga starred in the fifth season of American Horror Story as a hotel owner named Elizabeth, a role that ran from October 2015 to January 2016. At the 73rd Golden Globe Awards, she received the Best Actress in a Miniseries or Television Film award. Critics who had long known her as a pop star watched her inhabit the role of a character consumed by darkness. She later said the role prompted her to explore "the art of darkness" in her subsequent music.

  Her performance at the 87th Academy Awards, where she sang a medley from The Sound of Music in tribute to Julie Andrews, triggered more than 214,000 interactions per minute globally on Facebook, according to Billboard. The publication named her their 2015 Woman of the Year. She and Diane Warren co-wrote "Til It Happens to You" for the documentary The Hunting Ground, which earned them an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song.

  On the 5th of February, 2017, Gaga headlined the Super Bowl LI halftime show at NRG Stadium in Houston. Hundreds of lighted drones formed shapes in the sky above the stadium, the first time robotic aircraft appeared in a Super Bowl program. The performance attracted 117.5 million viewers in the United States, exceeding the game's own audience of 111.3 million viewers. CBS Sports ranked it the second best halftime show in Super Bowl history. Downloads of Gaga's songs surged by 410,000 in the United States in the aftermath.

  Later that year, the Netflix documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two premiered, showing her creation of the Joanne album and preparation for the Super Bowl alongside visible suffering from chronic pain, later revealed to stem from fibromyalgia. The illness prompted her to cancel the last ten shows of the Joanne World Tour in February 2018. The tour had ultimately grossed $95 million from 842,000 tickets sold.

• 7. A Star Is Born and Beyond

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  Bradley Cooper approached Gaga for A Star Is Born after seeing her perform at a cancer research fundraiser. She agreed to the project because of its portrayal of addiction and depression. The film premiered at the 2018 Venice Film Festival and released worldwide that October. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called it "outrageously watchable" and described Gaga as functioning "at the highest level" with her ability to move between ordinary person and celebrity. Stephanie Zacharek of Time highlighted her "knockout performance" without her usual makeup, wigs, and costumes.

  The lead single, "Shallow", was released on the 27th of September, 2018, and topped charts in Australia, the UK, and the United States. The soundtrack contains 34 tracks, including 17 original songs, and debuted at number one in the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the UK. Mark Kennedy of The Washington Post called it a "five-star marvel". As of June 2019, the soundtrack had sold over six million copies worldwide.

  "Shallow" made Gaga the first person to win an Academy Award, a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, and a Grammy in the same year. She performed the song live at both the 61st Annual Grammy Awards and the 91st Academy Awards. The film brought her four Grammy Awards in total.

  For her next acting challenge, Gaga learned to speak with an Italian accent for Ridley Scott's House of Gucci and stayed in character for 18 months, maintaining the accent for nine of those months during filming. The method acting took a toll: she had to be accompanied on-set by a psychiatric nurse toward the end of production. The film released on the 24th of November, 2021, and despite mixed overall reviews, critics praised her performance as "note-perfect". Her second collaborative jazz album with Tony Bennett, Love for Sale, also arrived in 2021, winning them the Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards.

• 8. Mayhem and the Record Books

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  Gaga released "Die with a Smile", a duet with Bruno Mars, on the 16th of August, 2024. It topped the Billboard Global 200 for 18 weeks and made Gaga the first act to achieve multiple United States number-one songs in the 2000s, the 2010s, and the 2020s. The track topped the Billboard Hot 100 Year-End Chart of 2025 and was the most streamed song of 2025 globally by on-demand audio streams, accumulating 2.858 billion streams. At the 67th Annual Grammy Awards, it won Best Pop Duo/Group Performance, giving Gaga the first three wins in that category by a single artist.

  Her album Mayhem was released on the 7th of March, 2025, conceived as a pop record at the recommendation of her partner Michael Polansky, whom she had become engaged to the previous April. Billboard described it as "a chaotic blur of genres" incorporating synth-pop, industrial dance, electro, disco, and pop rock, with lyrics exploring themes of love, chaos, fame, identity, and desire. It debuted at number one in the United States to critical acclaim.

  In support of Mayhem, Gaga performed a free concert at Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro as part of the "Todo Mundo no Rio" initiative. The audience was estimated at between 2.1 and 2.5 million people, making it the most-attended concert by a female artist. The Mayhem Ball concert tour concluded in April 2026, becoming her highest-grossing tour with earnings of $362.9 million from 1.6 million sold tickets.

  At the 68th Annual Grammy Awards, Gaga won Best Pop Vocal Album for Mayhem and Best Dance Pop Recording for "Abracadabra". Her total of 16 Grammy Awards places her among the most decorated artists in the ceremony's history. The 2026 film The Devil Wears Prada 2 cast her in a feud with Meryl Streep's character, and she recorded three original songs for its soundtrack, including the single "Runway" with Doechii, marking another new creative direction decades after that first open mic night in New York City.