Lady Gaga was born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta into a strict Catholic family on 28 March 1986 in New York. She began playing piano at the age of four and honed her formative skills while attending the private all-girls Roman Catholic school ‘Convent of the Sacred Heart’. She wrote her first ballad at the age of thirteen and from fourteen was performing at local open-mic nights. She also appeared in several school productions, such as ‘Guys and Dolls’ and ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.’ At fifteen she even had a small role in ‘The Sopranos’.
Aged seventeen, after leaving high-school, she was encouraged by her mother to apply for the 'Collaborative Arts Project' in New York to study music -she was one of twenty students to gain early admission to the establishment.
In her second year, she dropped out in order to focus on her music career, her father agreed to pay her rent for a year if she promised to return home if things didn’t go according to plan.
Gaga's first foray into the limelight occurred in summer 2005 when she recorded two songs with hip-hop artist Grandmaster Melle Mel for an audio book that accompanied a children's novel called ‘The Portal in the Park’. In September that year she established the Stefani Germanotta Band with some friends from her former university. Playing a mixture of self-penned tracks and covers of classic rock songs, SGB generated a small fan base at bars across New York.