From her forthcoming turn in House of Gucci to her outrageous Met Gala looks, Lady Gaga (a.k.a. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, a.k.a. Ally Maine) has established herself as one of the best-known pop stars and actors working today. You might think you’ve gleaned everything there is to know about Gaga from the pages of Us Weekly, but trust us, there’s more to learn. Without further ado, here are five things you likely didn’t know about Lady Gaga.
1. She comes by her outrageous, trendsetting fashion sense honestly. For her first-ever performance in a first-grade school play, Gaga created her own outfit out of—you guessed it—tinfoil and hangers. Not such a leap from there to meat dresses and fishbowl-shaped face masks, is it?
2. Her acting career goes back a lot further than you may think. While Gaga is best-known for A Star Is Born (and her already iconic performance as Patrizia Reggiani in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, arriving next month), her very first role—or, at least, the first role listed on her IMDb page—was “Girl at Swimming Pool #2” in a 2001 episode of the HBO series The Sopranos. If you fast-forward to the swimming-pool scene of the episode, titled “The Telltale Moozadell,” you can actually see Gaga in all her giggly teen glory...who knew that that would be far from her last time on screen?
3. Gaga’s outrageous performance style didn’t always rub people the right way, and at one point, her detractors included her (well-meaning) own father. The singer recalls when her dad first saw her onstage, she was wearing “a leopard-thong-fringed bikini with a sequined high-waisted belt and granny panties, and it was so wrong, it was amazing.” While he stayed throughout the entire performance, and told Gaga that she “did a great job,” he was concerned for his daughter’s well-being. “He was shocked. And alarmed,” she said. “My mother told me he broke down and told her he thought I was crazy. Really crazy. Later that week, my family said, ‘It was just really hard to watch that show, and we think you’ve lost your mind and we don’t know what to do.’”
4. She wrote her first hit, “Just Dance,” in record time. “I was very hungover. I wrote the song in about 10 minutes with [producer] RedOne. And it was my first time being in a Hollywood studio. Very pristine, big huge room with giant speakers.” She told The Guardian in 2009 that she initially had trouble getting radio stations to play it. “We’ve been trying to get it played in the U.S. since March,” she said. “I mean, it just doesn’t sound like Katy Perry’s ‘I Kissed a Girl’—which is a beautiful, lovely, amazing hit record and it sounds like a radio hit. My song doesn’t sound like a radio hit. I mean, it does, but it doesn’t.”
5. While Gaga is credited as one of the most innovative artists in the business, she’s also responsible for a revolutionary invention in the world of perfume. When she was creating her first fragrance, Fame, she told executives at Coty that she wanted the liquid to be black in the bottle and clear when it sprayed. “I started to sweat on my forehead,” Yael Tuil, the vice president of global marketing at Coty, told Vogue in 2012. “I said, ‘My God! That’s impossible! How can we do that?’ ” Eventually, scientists developed a potion to meet Gaga’s specs, and the company now has a patent pending for the black-to-clear liquid technology. “She was really behind the most important innovation in the fragrance industry in the last 20 years,” Tuil said. “She is really pushing boundaries.”
