Amanda Lear Legendary pop diva . . .♥

 Amanda Lear.. Legendary pop diva continues to play her role in all things fabulous…

From Fantastic Man n° 2

Text by GERT JONKERS

Photography by ANDREAS LARSSEN

Styling by KIM JONES

She was romantically involved with Bryan Ferry and Salvador Dali. She was the London supergroupie and party girl who became a role model for Patsy Stone in over-the-top British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous. She was Thierry Mugler’s muse and modelled for Mary Quant and Ossie Clark. A professional painter, Amanda Lear suddenly found herself hailed in the 70s as the new bombshell disco sensation. Her hits included Enigma (Give a Bit of MMH to Me) and Fashion Pack (an instant dance-floor filler namedropping Warhol, Scavullo…). She sang – parlando style – in such a low voice that rumours of her transsexuality, despite being flatly denied by herself, persisted and have never really faded away. These days Amanda lives in Paris, she’s a TV presenter in Italy, she acts, and she’s still fabulous.

AMANDA – So, darling, I actually hope you can understand what I say because I just lost my voice. I’ve been shouting and screaming too much… Plus, I was in a face star hotel in Rome where they chilled the rooms to around five degrees.

GERT – What were you doing in Rome?

We’ve just started this new TV show called Celebrity Dancing on Rai Uno, Saturdays, prime time. I’ll be stuck in Rome until January. Well, I prefer Rome to Paris anyhow – I don’t even know why I still live in Paris because I hate Paris. Meanwhile, I’m shooting this American movie with Vincent Gallo. It’s super exciting to work on a proper American film project, instead of the usual European low-budget blah-blah-blah. I’m playing Vincent Gallo’s sister. I look very, very different for that role, with a pitch black, curly wig. It’s very Sophia Loren. It’s fun, and I get to show that I can actually act and not just be ‘Fabulous Amanda Lear’. I really love acting; I’d like to do more in the future. It’s very good for my mind – I’m somebody with severe mental problems, you know… depression, schizophrenia. I’m seeing a psychiatrist, of course, but acting is also a good way to release things that I normally keep inside, like my jealously, my emotions. My energy needs to be channelled into something creative. Acting is good, song-writing is good, painting is good. It’s a shame that I didn’t paint for years and years just because Salvador Dali discouraged me. He used to say, ‘The talent is in the balls, and women don’t have balls.’ But I need to do things. When I sit around doing nothing but shopping, that’s bad. Bad for my credit card, but bad for me too.

You’re still singing, right?

But of course! And I’m constantly fighting with my record companies, because they’re always behaving so badly. I always say that I want to work with the best producers, like Kraftwerk or the Pet Shop Boys, but it never happens and I always end up with crap recordings. I have a new album out in Italy called Paris By Night, which is basically just one song, Paris By Night, remixed by 14 different DJs. I’m not crazy about it because I’m not into techno. It’s just not for me, and listen, I can’t spend the rest of my life making disco music and going to clubs at 3am to promote the stuff. I can’t stay awake that long, you know? What I want to do for my next record is Amanda Lear singing evergreens. That’s what I really what I want to do. New York, New York, My Way, La Vie en Rose… Songs that everybody knows, but sung with my voice. Like when I sand Lili Marleen in 1978, people loved it. But there is a new compilation album of mine out in France that I really do like. Follow Me, the Queen of Chinatown, Love Boat, all the hits. It’s called Forever Glam, because, you know, the record company that I was glamorous…

And what do you think? Are you glamorous?

It’s not really what I’m into. Glamour for me is Hollywood, sequin dresses, Marlene Dietrich. But hey, in the end I guess glamour is a way of life; it’s an attitude, like elegance. You can be elegant in jeans and a pair of basketball trainers, you know? When I walk into a TV studio people shout and scream, ‘Oh, wow, isn’t Amanda wonderfully glamourous!’ But I don’t do anything special. Maybe it’s because I was a model for many years – it’s the way I walk, or the fact that I keep my head up.

Do you enjoy wearing menswear sometimes?

Well, my personally style is very, let me say…over the top and feminine. Lots of sequins, lots of colour, a little too much of everything. That’s why I love Italian fashion. But I think cross-dressing is a very sexy thing. There’s nothing sexier than a girl wearing men’s clothes. I remember a lovely picture of Sharon Stone wearing some really awful men’s undies and they looked fantastic on her. Conversely… I think it’s good if men wear more feminine clothes. I love to see a man wearing lots of beads and diamonds. I mean, look at history… Louis XV war wearing wigs and make-up all the time. It’s just natural for men to show off.

I know I shouldn’t ask a lady her age, but how old are you?

I was born on the 18th of November, 1950, so you tell me… I sometimes lie and say I’m 52 or something like that. People are complimentary and say I look much younger, but when I look in the mirror I know exactly what’s wrong with me – the wrinkles and everything. But what can I do? I’ll have to accept it, although I’ve told myself never to surrender. I don’t want to look like Marianne Faithfull, so I take care of myself. I need to stay in shape. I use a great new Dutch invention, the Power Plate. It’s the best invention ever, I’m telling you. They called me up to do some promotion for it so I said, well, send me one, because they’re super expensive. It’s a miracle machine – it’s like the best sex you ever had.

Isn’t it a big shame that you never broke the American market?

Not at all, thank you. At some point I had the opportunity to work there – my records were released there, I toured, I sang in New York, in LA, I was in Interview magazine. But I quickly realized it was not my country. I couldn’t give a damn about Hollywood or singing in Las Vegas, so I concentrated on Europe and I’m the happier for it. I’ve got a beautiful career; I’m famous in Germany, Italy, France, Spain… I don’t have the ambition to be queen of the world, or to be Madonna. That’s not me. My ambition is to pay the rent and to paint and sing and act. And to sometimes be able to walk into the Prada store and buy myself a nice new handbag.

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CONTRIBUTIONS

Amanda was photographed at the George V Hotel in Paris. Hair by Duffy at Premiere. Printing by Berra. Styling assistant Matt Dainty. Photography assistant Julia Beurq. Thanks to Jimi Dams, Steven Philip, Deep Kailey and Bertrand Bizet at KCD Paris.

Amanda Lear, Iconic Salvador Dalí Muse, Looks Back at Her Life in Parties ....

 The model, artist, actor, pop star, and queer idol has seen and done it all.

Written by Kyle Munzenrieder for wmagazine. Click !

Amanda Lear modeled for Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, and Paco Rabanne; dated David Bowie and a Rolling Stone; and forged a successful music career of her own—but she never planned any of it. “I think my whole destiny was probably written somewhere in the stars. I never tried anything. I never went to school to learn acting. Everything happened by chance.” While Lear has been content to let the details of her earliest days remain something of a mystery, she found herself in 1960s Paris, studying art, and was persuaded to model part-time. “I said why not, if I make good money? I actually had no idea how to put on makeup or how to walk.” She got her start with a young Lagerfeld when he was at Jean Patou, and was mentored by Catherine Harlé, an agency head who had a knack for turning her models into the It girls of the day.

Amanda Lear values discipline but still believes in the power of chance encounters. After all, it was during a night out with Rabanne that she met Salvador Dalí, the artist who adopted her as a muse. Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry led her to Bowie, who in turn encouraged her musical ambitions. She’s recorded 22 albums, starred in productions on the stage and screen, exhibited her paintings around the world, written numerous books, and still has no intention of slowing down. Chanel’s recent use of her song “Follow Me” in an ad for their Coco Mademoiselle fragrance has led to new searches for her music, and this year she’s touring Europe with a part in the play The Scopone Game. While Lear appreciates the interest in her trajectory, she says what keeps her going is the future: “I’m not into nostalgia. I do not look back saying, ‘Oh my god, it was a good time!’ I don’t give a shit. What’s interesting to me is, what’s going to happen tomorrow? What am I going to do next year? What keeps me going is this curiosity.”

Alongside friends like Anita Pallenberg, Lear often found herself in Swinging London, surrounded by artists and rock stars. “All those parties were about drinking and boozing and smoking dope. I’ve never been into that,” she says. “Well, a little bit in the late ’60s.” Here, Lear is captured by the photographer Peter Schlesinger, a fixture of that era.

Aside from a good DJ, Lear has one mandate for a successful soirée. “It’s very important to have people who are well-dressed,” she says. “Whenever we used to go to Studio 54, we had to dress up. Otherwise, they wouldn’t let you in. You have to bring out the paillettes and the glitter and the feathers. You don’t just walk into the party in jeans like it’s your office.” As long as you’re making an effort, however, Lear doesn’t care about your background. “A good party has a mixture of rich and poor people—models and truck drivers together. That’s important.”

“Nowadays, most model girls dream of going out with a football player. But in my day, as soon as the boy had long hair and was holding a guitar, we were in love with him,” says Lear. She was linked for a while to Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and was close friends with Pattie Boyd, the model who married George Harrison from the Beatles. “Everybody says, ‘Oh my god, you knew the Beatles?’ When people say that to me, I feel like a dinosaur in Jurassic Park. I mean, lots of other girls met them as well. It’s nothing special.”

In the ’70s, Lear was offered opportunities to expand her modeling career but chose nightlife instead. “Diana Vreeland told me, ‘I like you, but if you want to work in New York, you have to be ready every morning with your hair washed and your nails done, and looking really fresh and well made up to see all the photographers.’ Obviously, I couldn’t do that because I was out dancing.”

Amanda Lear was a star member of Dalí’s posse. She appeared by his side at press conferences, galas, and parties and stayed with him at the St. Regis hotel in New York, where the artist made his presence known in grand fashion. “He was always surrounded by all kinds of photographers and parasites and models,” she says. “He enjoyed every day at five o’clock what he called tea time—having all these people around him at the hotel. Most of them were hangers-on. They were just there to have a free drink.”

The artist did not make a good first impression. “He said, ‘You have the most beautiful skull I’ve ever seen.’ I wasn’t very pleased being called a skull,” recalls Lear. “He said, ‘What do you do?’ In those days, being a model was not something very glorious. So I said, ‘I’m a painter, like you.’ He was very cold and said, ‘Oh, forget it. You cannot be a painter because women cannot paint.’ So I thought, This man is an asshole, and I’ll never see him again.”

Dalí, however, quickly recovered from his fumble. “The next day, he called me, and this time we got along very well. I stayed with him as his model and friend for 16 or 17 years.” Lear spent her summers with Dalí and his wife, Gala, in Catalonia, Spain, and traveled with him across the globe, but always by boat (“He was terrified of flying,” says Lear). She served as a model for several of his artworks and wrote the 1984 autobiography My Life With Dalí. At one point, Lear even persuaded the artist to take the part of the emperor in director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s never-produced adaptation of Dune. Lear was to be Princess Irulan, the character played in the current franchise by Florence Pugh.

It was through her trips to New York with Dalí that Lear started to mix with Andy Warhol. “They liked each other, but there was a competition between Warhol and Dalí,” she says. “Both had crazy entourages.” While Lear was decidedly in Dalí’s camp, she socialized freely with Warhol (left) and his superstars. Here, she’s at the 1974 wedding reception for rock star Sly Stone and model Kathy Silva, at the Waldorf Astoria.

In the early ’70s, Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry (above) spotted Lear modeling and was instantly transfixed. “He took me to his flat, where he had a framed photograph of Kim Novak. He said, ‘Kim Novak is my ideal woman.’ I said, ‘Me too. The only reason why I made my hair blonde was because of Kim Novak.’ ”

Ferry had envisioned a Novak-like woman for the cover of his band’s next album, For Your Pleasure (right), and decided Lear was perfect. “I was terrified of the black panther. I didn’t like the way she looked at me,” Lear recalls of the shoot. A tranquilizer and some retouching fixed the issue. The album was a commercial success and remains a glam rock staple. It also brought Lear wider attention. “David Bowie fell in love with that photograph. He didn’t fall in love with me—he fell in love with a photograph.”

“One night, I got a call from my friend Marianne Faithfull: ‘I’m here with David Bowie. He wants to meet you.’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah, sure he does. It’s one o’clock in the morning. I’m in bed.’ She put Bowie (above) on the phone, and he said, ‘You look fantastic in that photograph.’ ” The pair had what Lear calls “a sort of two-year affair,” but Bowie also sensed Lear’s potential star power. “He was the very first person who said, ‘Amanda, you should sing.’ I said, ‘But I’m not a singer. I’m a model.’ And he said no. He paid for my singing lessons. He put me under contract with his manager. That’s how it started. In fact, it all started from that photograph.” Her debut album was aptly titled I Am a Photograph.

Amanda Lear signed to the Munich-based record label Ariola, which specialized in European disco, and took her show on the road. “If you have a great voice like Donna Summer or Grace Jones, you just have to sing. But in my case, because I wasn’t sure my voice was good enough, I decided to surround myself with beautiful half-naked boys.” Nightclub impresario Fabrice Emaer invited her to play at his hot spot Le Palace, the French equivalent of Studio 54. “There were 5,000 people outside, blocking the street. Overnight I was hailed as the disco star of Paris.”

Amanda Lear was often on television, and one performance caught the eye of Silvio Berlusconi, the future prime minister of Italy, who was at that time a mere media tycoon. “He said, ‘I would like you to host my big Saturday night show,’ ” says Lear. “He needed someone who could speak French, English, Spanish, and Italian, and I speak five languages. We had lots of fabulous guests, like James Brown and Tina Turner.” Lear hosted several successful shows in Italy for nearly two decades. One program, Ars Amanda, saw her interviewing politicians, intellectuals, and celebrities in bed.

“Grace Jones is a bit like me because she was a model before too. She has kept an image all these years, and she’s one of the few left,” says Lear, who feels she and Jones have influenced some of today’s pop stars. “When I see the girls today, they are a bit like our daughters. They’re doing the same thing we were doing: being shocking, provocative, making gay people dance in the discotheque. But Grace and I were doing it 50 years ago.”

Amanda Lear never gave up her original love of painting. “That saved my life,” she says. “All my friends go mad. They go to the psychiatrist because they’ve got problems. I don’t need a shrink because painting, to me, is therapy.” Lear has displayed her work across the globe, including at a show during Art Basel in Switzerland earlier this year. “I sold 12 paintings in Art Basel. If I could pay my rent just by painting, I would probably stop show business altogether and just sit there at home and paint.”

Amanda Lear doesn’t miss her modeling days. “They say, ‘Stand straight, close your mouth, be beautiful, shut up,’ ” she says. “And I love talking.” But she’s been persuaded over the years to pose for pictures and get back on the runway, including for Thierry Mugler’s fall 1990 show in Paris (above). “The designers still like me. They say, ‘You’re a fashion icon.’ I hate that word. I am not an icon; I’m a survivor. I’m probably one of the few still alive.” These days she’s a frequent front-row fixture at Diesel, Rabanne, Gaultier, and Kim Jones’s shows for Dior Homme. She also recently worked with Jacquemus.

Amanda Lear talks to Jean Paul Gaultier on the phone all the time, but it took a bit of persuasion to get her back on the catwalk for the designer’s retirement show, in 2020 (above). “He said, ‘Amanda, you have the best legs I’ve ever seen. You must show your legs!’ ” After the presentation, dressers backstage removed her gown, and Lear had to take an elevator to change back into her regular clothes. “I walked into that lift and I’m completely naked, and the door closed and I’m all alone with Anna Wintour. It was so embarrassing. I said, ‘I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t know you were here.’ She was very nice, actually. She said, ‘No, it’s all right. I enjoyed the show.’ ”

In 2023, Lear took a part in Amazon Prime’s French hit Escort Boys (above), a dramedy about male sex workers. Alongside the likes of Rossy de Palma and Gossip Girl’s Kelly Rutherford, Lear played a client. Her character, she notes, wasn’t satisfied and wanted her money back. “It was very funny to film because that boy was absolutely stark naked. I mean, I didn’t know where to look,” she says. “Aren’t you embarrassed to be totally naked?” she asked. “He said, ‘No, I don’t care.’ I realized that today the boys are really exhibitionists. In fact, they love to be exactly what we girls had been doing for all those centuries, being treated just as a sex object, but they enjoy it.” Lear also had a part in the recent fashion drama La Maison, on Apple TV+, and continues to tour Europe starring in several plays. “The theater is really unbelievable. It’s such a thrill every night.”

Amanda Lear admits she’s just pretending to paint in the 1984 publicity photo above. Taken at her home in the south of France, it showcases another of her great interests: men. “That was the good old days. I cannot complain. I had the most beautiful boys in the world—it’s true. Marvelous boyfriends, models, actors, whatever. Even now there are a lot of boys calling me; perhaps they’re into gerontophilia,” she says. “But I’m better alone. Most of my friends my age say, ‘We are so lonely, it’s terrible!’ This is all rubbish. Being alone is wonderful: I do what I want, I dress how I want, I eat what I want, I watch what I want on TV. And I love it.”