Lady Gaga is constantly in character, whether she's onstage, onscreen or just going about her day-to-day life.
The Applause singer took the world by storm following the release of her 2008 debut album Fame and she has become known for her often eye-popping fashions both on screen and on stage, while she also turns heads with her wardrobe choices when she's off duty.
The superstar admits she drew from the "stronger" parts of her personality to create her Gaga persona, but the character she presents in public is only part of the person she is in real life.
"I guess the thing is, what I am as Gaga really is what other people think Gaga is," she says during an interview with actress Jamie Lee Curtis on television programme Actors on Actors. "It's not necessarily what I am. Gaga is this stronger individual part of myself that I discovered being young in New York - loving music, meeting with young artists, working with musicians, with writers, studying the scene, and being involved in the lifestyle. I started to call myself Gaga. (It) was the nickname I had at my best. It is a bit of a creation. But it's other people that have created (it) through what I've made; their perception of what Gaga is, is a separate entity from me."
Lady Gaga, real name Stefani Germanotta, who earned a Golden Globe Award earlier this year (16) for her performance as The Countess in hit U.S. TV show American Horror Story: Hotel, went on the explain to the 57-year-old Halloween star her foray into acting is consistently inspired by her pop music career, and vice versa - and therefore she can never separate her different character creations.
"What I am at any given moment is some sort of amalgamation of Stefani - a young Italian-American girl from New York whos an actress and a songwriter and a rebel - and what I'm creatively interested in at the time: the music and culture and lifestyle and art that's influencing me as I'm reading and writing music," she details. "If I'm playing a character at the same time, I'm also that as well. I live a lifestyle of endless, relentless love for making my work. That informs me as a person in every way, all the time. It's a quite difficult thing for me to answer, because I'm entirely Stefani and I'm entirely Gaga. But I was also entirely the Countess (on American Horror Story: Hotel)."
