French model, singer, lyricist, TV host, actress and painter. Contested facts about her biography include her birth date (cited as 18 November 1939, also 1941, 1946, 1948 and 1950) and place (Hong Kong, Saigon or Hanoi), the gender she was assigned at birth, names and nationalities of her parents (French-English father and an Asian-Russian mother), and the location of her upbringing.
She was raised in the South of France and moved to Paris to make a career in painting. She became a top model, a fixture of the mid 1960s Swinging London and one of Salvador Dalí’s muses, who’s said to have coined her stage name / public persona (L’Amant de Dalí - Dalí’s lover). She dated Brian Jones in 1966 and was briefly engaged to Bryan Ferry from Roxy Music, for whom she posed as the lady with the panther on the cover of their 2nd album [m58142] (1973). After a brief affair, David Bowie advised her to try her luck as a singer.
From the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, she was a million-album-selling disco queen, mainly in Continental Europe and Scandinavia. To get started as a singer and to have her audience intrigued, Lear herself harnessed a rumour about her assigned gender at birth - a subject that obsessed Salvador Dalí, whom she considered her spiritual father. Lear would frequently deny the allegations about her transgender identity yet at the same time referred to them in her songs Fabulous (Lover, Love Me), If I Was A Boy or I’m A Mistery (deliberately misspelled as to reference the word mister). Since the early 1980s she has presented TV shows in Italy, France and Germany and is a theatre actress.