Twisted Tales: The Transgender Mystery of International Pop Diva Amanda Lear

Posted on Mar 27th 2009 3:00PM by James Sullivan
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She's like the Forrest Gump of international pop. In her 50 years in the Jet Set, Amanda Lear has befriended the Rolling Stones, dated David Bowie, had a "spiritual marriage" with the surrealist painter Salvador Dali and posed for Playboy.

She's like a Forrest Gump -- that is, if anyone ever suspected that Mr. Gump had undergone a sex-change operation.

Allow us to explain. For decades, rumors have swirled that the chameleonic six-foot starlet Amanda Lear was a performing transvestite who became Dali's greatest art project -- a boy who became a girl. Though Lear herself has always denied it, she has also worked the rumors to her lifelong advantage. "There is nothing the pop world loves more than a way-out freak," she has said.

Born in 1946 in Hong Kong to a French/English father and a Russian/Asian mother, she was one of a kind from the jump. Raised in France and Switzerland, as a teenager Lear went to Paris to study art. Over the years, a succession of famous European transsexual entertainers have claimed they worked in Paris in the late '50s with a teenage boy named Alain Tapp, who performed under the assumed name Peki d'Oslo and would later become Amanda Lear.

Moving next to swinging London, Lear fell into the nightclub crowd, where she befriended rock stars like the Stones' Brian Jones and the Who's Keith Moon and was soon discovered by Europe's biggest modeling agency. A notorious part of the scene, she became the thinly disguised subject of a Stones song, 'Miss Amanda Jones.' Around this time, Lear met Dali, who took her under his wing. Years later, in her book 'My Life With Dali,' she explained the artist's fascination with her image: He loved effeminate boys and the Greek ideal of the hermaphrodite, she wrote.

With a deep voice and an ambiguous persona, Lear took the painter's advice, creating a spectacle that would propel her singing career. Her celebrity fed off itself. Briefly engaged to Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry, she posed in a leather dress, holding a leashed panther, for the cover of the Roxy album 'For Your Pleasure.' Shortly thereafter, she had a yearlong affair with Bowie.

When the disco craze hit, Lear was ready-made for it. Her albums 'Sweet Revenge' and the aptly titled 'Never Trust a Pretty Face' produced several huge hits across the globe. Emerging as a superstar in Germany, Japan, France and Italy, she had chart records in more than 40 countries. (Lear has sold a reported 25 million singles and 15 million albums to date.) Despite posing for Playboy in 1977, however -- "they could see I was a woman like everybody else," she said -- she never had the same success in America that she enjoyed overseas.

Though she lost her husband in an explosion that leveled their house in 2000, Lear continues to record, paint and show up where she's least expected. Joanna Lumley, who played Patsy Stone in the hit British comedy 'Absolutely Fabulous,' has acknowledged that her character was based in part on the strange legend of Ms. Amanda Lear. Lear was reportedly asked to star in a French film version of the show, but she declined.

"I've already lived it," she said.

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