Lady Gaga Fan Artwork

Life and career
• 1986–2004: Early life
Lady Gaga was born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta on March 28, 1986, in New York City. The first child of Joseph Germanotta, an internet entrepreneur, and Cynthia (née Bissett), Gaga has one sister, Natali, who was born in 1992. She is of Italian and more distant French-Canadian ancestry. Gaga is left-handed and began learning to play piano aged four, went on to write her first piano ballad at 13, and began performing at open mike nights by the age of 14. Raised as a Roman Catholic on Manhattan's Upper West Side after the family moved there in 1993, Gaga attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private all-girls Roman Catholic school on Manhattan's Upper East Side, from the age of 11. Despite the affluence of the Upper West Side, Gaga stressed that she did not come from a wealthy background, stating that her parents "both came from lower-class families, so we've worked for everything—my mother worked eight to eight out of the house, in telecommunications, and so did my father." She described her academic life in high school as "very dedicated, very studious, very disciplined" but also "a bit insecure" as she told in an interview, "I used to get made fun of for being either too provocative or too eccentric, so I started to tone it down. I didn't fit in, and I felt like a freak." Acquaintances dispute that she did not fit in at school. "She had a core group of friends; she was a good student. She liked boys a lot, but singing was No. 1," recalled a former high school classmate.
An avid actor in high school musicals, Gaga portrayed the lead roles of Adelaide in Guys and Dolls and Philia in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. both at Regis High School. She also appeared in a very small role as a mischievous classmate in the television drama series The Sopranos in a 2001 episode titled "The Telltale Moozadell". At 16, she began to sing and play in front of live audiences and unsuccessfully auditioned for parts in New York shows. When her time at the Convent of the Sacred Heart came to an end, her mother encouraged her to apply to New York University to study drama and performance – specifically the Collaborative Arts Project 21 (CAP21), which is a faculty of the Tisch School of the Arts.