User:Ajof2001/Lady Gaga

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was born on March 28, 1986, at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, New York City, to an upper middle class Catholic family. Both of her parents have Italian ancestry, and she also has more distant French-Canadian roots. Her parents are Cynthia Louise (née Bissett), a philanthropist and business executive, Joseph Germanotta, an Internet entrepreneur, and she has a younger sister named Natali. Brought up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Gaga said in an interview that her parents came from lower-class families and worked hard for everything. From age eleven, she attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private all-girls Roman Catholic school. Gaga has described her high-school self as "very dedicated, very studious, very disciplined" but also "a bit insecure". She considered herself a misfit, and was mocked for "being either too provocative or too eccentric".

Gaga began playing the piano at age four when her mother insisted she become "a cultured young woman". She took piano lessons and practiced throughout her childhood. The lessons taught her to create music by listening aurally, which she preferred over reading sheet music. Her parents encouraged her to pursue music and enrolled her in Creative Arts Camp. As a teenager, she played at open mic nights. Gaga also preformed in musicals, playing the lead roles of Adelaide in the play Guys and Dolls and Philia in the play A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at Regis High School. She also studied method acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute for ten years. In New York, Gaga auditioned for various television shows, but was largely unsuccessful. However, she did appear in a small role as a high-school student in a 2001 episode of The Sopranos titled "The Telltale Moozadell". She later said of her inclination towards music:"I don't know exactly where my affinity for music comes from, but it is the thing that comes easiest to me. When I was like three years old, I may have been even younger, my mom always tells this really embarrassing story of me propping myself up and playing the keys like this because I was too young and short to get all the way up there. Just go like this on the low end of the piano ... I was really, really good at piano, so my first instincts were to work so hard at practicing piano, and I might not have been a natural dancer, but I am a natural musician. That is the thing that I believe I am the greatest at."In 2003, at age 17, Gaga received early admission to Collaborative Arts Project 21, a music school at New York University (NYU)'s Tisch School of the Arts, and lived in an NYU dorm. She studied music there, and improved her songwriting skills by writing essays on art, religion, social issues and politics, including a thesis on pop artists Spencer Tunick and Damien Hirst. In 2005, she withdrew from university during the second semester of her second year to focus on her music career. That year, she was also cast as an unsuspecting diner customer in MTV's Boiling Points, a prank reality television show.

In a 2014 interview, Gaga said she had been raped at age 19, for which she later underwent mental and physical therapy. She suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which she attributes to the incident, crediting her doctors, family and friends with supporting and helping her. Gaga later gave additional details about the rape, including that "the person who raped me dropped me off pregnant on a corner at my parents' house because I was vomiting and sick. Because I'd been being abused. I was locked away in a studio for months."