First Lady of France

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, First Lady of France

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy (born Carla Gilberta Bruni Tedeschi, 23 December 1967) is an Italian-born, French songwriter, singer, and former model. Since February 2008, she has been married to the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Carla Gilberta Bruni Tedeschi was born in Turin, Italy, and is heiress to the fortune created by the Italian tire manufacturing company CEAT, founded in the 1920s by her grandfather Virginio Bruni Tedeschi. The company was sold in the 1970s to Pirelli (the brand lives on via its former subsidiary in India, founded in 1958). The family moved to France in 1975, reportedly to escape the threat of kidnapping by the Red Brigades, a Marxist-Leninist terrorist group active in Italy in the 1970s. Bruni grew up in France from age seven and attended boarding school in Switzerland. She went to Paris to study art and architecture, but left school at 19 to become a model.

She is legally the daughter of Italian concert pianist Marisa Borini and industrialist and classical composer Alberto Bruni Tedeschi. However, in 2008 Bruni told Vanity Fair that her biological father is an Italian-born, Brazilian grocery magnate Maurizio Remmert, a young classical guitarist who had a six-year affair with her mother. Her sister is actress and movie director Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. She also had a brother, Virginio Bruni Tedeschi (1959 – 4 July 2006), who died from complications of HIV/AIDS.

From her biological father, she has a half-sister, Consuelo Remmert.

Bruni signed with City Models at age 19. Paul Marciano, president and creative director of Guess? Inc., came across her picture among composite cards of aspiring models and chose her to model with Estelle Lefébure in campaigns for Guess? jeans. Bruni subsequently worked for designers and fashion houses such as Christian Dior, Givenchy, Paco Rabanne, Sonia Rykiel, Christian Lacroix, Karl Lagerfeld, John Galliano, Yves Saint-Laurent,Shiatzy Chen ,Chanel and Versace.[6] By the 1990s, Bruni was among the 20 highest-paid fashion models, earning $7.5 million a year. While modeling, Bruni dated Eric Clapton, then Mick Jagger.[7] On 11 April 2008, a 1993 nude photograph of Bruni sold at auction for US$91,000 (€65,093) — more than 60 times the expected price.[8] She was a modeling subject of a 1999 trompe-l’œil wool-knit dress body painting by Joanne Gair that is included in Gair’s second book, Body Painting: Masterpieces by Joanne Gair.

In 1997, Bruni quit the world of fashion to devote herself to music. She sent her lyrics to Julien Clerc in 1999, based on which he composed seven tracks on his 2000 album Si j’étais elle.

In 2002, her debut album Quelqu’un m’a dit, produced by ex-lover Louis Bertignac, was released in Europe with success in Francophone countries. Three songs from the album appear in Hans Canosa’s 2005 American film Conversations with Other Women, the song Le Plus Beau du quartier was used in H&M’s Christmas 2006 commercial, and the title track was featured in the 2003 movie Le Divorce and in the 2009 movie (500) Days of Summer. In January 2010, her song L’amoreuse was featured in the season 3 episode of NBC’s Chuck Chuck vs. First Class.

In 2005, she duetted with Louis Bertignac on the song Les Frôleuses on his new album. In 2006, Bruni recorded Those Little Things an English-language translation of the Serge Gainsbourg song Ces petits riens for the tribute album Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited. She took part in the opening ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics in a parade paying tribute to the Italian flag.

Her second album, No Promises containing poems by William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, Walter de la Mare, and Christina Rosetti, set to music, was released in January 2007.

Her music career did not cease after her marriage. She released her third album Comme si de rien n’était (As If Nothing Happened) on 11 July 2008. The songs are self-penned except for one rendition of “You Belong to Me” and another song featuring a poem La Possibilité d’une île by Michel Houellebecq set to music. Royalties from the album will be donated to unidentified charitable and humanitarian cause.

Bruni sang for Nelson Mandela’s 91st birthday on July 18, 2009 at Radio City Musical Hall in New York City. The event was her first public music appearance since marrying Sarkozy.

She is currently working on her fourth album and according to reports will be collaborating with Lenny Kravitz. In January 2010, it was reported that she is working on two separate studio albums, one in French and another in English with a tentative release date set for Autumn 2010.

In September 2009, she recorded a duet with Harry Connick, Jr. for the French edition of his album Your Songs. The duet is “And I Love Her”, written by Lennon/McCartney. The album is released in France on October 26, 2009.

Italian singer/songwriter Simone Cristicchi’s entry in the 2010 San Remo Italian Song Festival was a track named “Meno Male”, with the chorus lyrics of “Meno male che c’è Carla Bruni” (“Thank goodness for Carla Bruni”). The song supposedly mocks Bruni and her husband, but Cristicchi stated in an interview for Italian television weekly TV Sorrisi e Canzoni that the song is about “our way of being Italian, [we are] always ready to follow any type of gossip and are disinterested in real problems”. Bruni was to be a guest singer at the 2010 San Remo festival but withdrew from participating, purportedly because she was offended by Cristicchi’s song.

She will be appearing on the upcoming tribute to David Bowie to be released in May 2010 on Manimal Vinyl Records.

Acting

Following months of speculation, in a television interview broadcast on 23 November 2009, Bruni revealed that she had accepted a role in a forthcoming Woody Allen film. She admitted her reasoning for embarking on the Paris production; “I’m not an actress at all. Perhaps I’ll be completely hopeless but I can’t miss an opportunity like this one. When I’m a grandmother I’d like to be able to say I made a film with Woody Allen.”

First Lady

Following her marriage to Sarkozy, in February 2008, Bruni continued accompanying him on state visits, including to the United Kingdom in March 2008, which created a sensation in the international press and the public in the UK and France. She has an office and staff at her disposal in the East wing of the Élysée Palace.

There was controversy on the eve of the state visit to the UK, with the publication by Christie’s auction house of a nude photograph of Bruni taken during her career as a model. The photograph sold for $91,000. There was also great interest in Bruni’s wardrobe, which was Christian Dior, seen as a diplomatic choice, being a French design house designed by John Galliano, a British designer. Another controversy was the use of a popular photo of the French President and Bruni in the print advertising of Ryanair. The couple was awarded damages by a French court which they donated to Les Restos du Cœur, an organisation which provides meals to the homeless.

Bruni met the Dalai Lama in August 2008 at Lerab Ling, a Buddhist temple on a hill in Languedoc, France. Another important event for Bruni was the reception of Pope Benedict XVI during his visit to France in September 2008. Bruni visited New York City in September 2008 with her husband, where she attended a meeting on poverty and female mortality with Queen Rania and Wendi Murdoch, met for lunch with First Lady Laura Bush at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the Symposium on Advancing Global Literacy and attended the General Assembly in the UN with her husband. She also attended state dinners with the Emir of Qatar and wife and with Iraq’s president in Paris in 2009. She and Sheikha Mozah (wife of Emir of Qatar) will be working together on the topic of education promotion. Bruni visited Doha on invitation of Sheikha Mozah in November 2009.

In December 2008, Bruni sued the makers of a bag featuring a nude shot of the French first lady taken during her supermodelling youth. Clothes designer Pardon has produced 10,000 of the shopping bags emblazoned with the nude photo taken in 1993, showing Bruni staring at the camera with her crossed hands covering her crotch.

In April 2009, Carla was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Carlos III on the occasion of the couple’s Spanish State Visit.

In October 2009 she launched CarlaBruniSarkozy.org, a website largely dealing with her philanthropic work.

In January 2010, Carla visited Benin which was her second visit as ambassador to The Global Fund. She also received Haitian orphans who survived the Haiti 2010 earthquake and were adopted by French families.

She has been critical of Pope Benedict XVI on the controversial topic of religion and AIDS. Regarding AIDS, it was confirmed that Mrs. Obama and Mrs. Sarkozy are likely to work together on the subject. White House sources confirmed that Mrs Obama was very interested in what Mrs. Sarkozy told her about her work with UNAIDS.

It has been claimed that Bruni was involved with Louis Bertignac, Mick Jagger (Jagger’s wife acknowledged his affair with Bruni was a reason for their separation), Eric Clapton, Léos Carax, Charles Berling, Arno Klarsfeld, Vincent Perez and former French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius.

She has said she is easily “bored with monogamy”, and that “love lasts a long time, but burning desire — two to three weeks”.

While living with Jean-Paul Enthoven, Bruni fell in love and started an affair with his son, philosophy professor Raphaël Enthoven (the song “Raphäel” from Bruni’s album Quelqu’un m’a dit is named after him), who was at the time married to novelist Justine Lévy, daughter of philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy. Bruni later denied ever having an affair with Raphaël’s father in an interview published in Vanity Fair, “I never slept with him, not even a minute.”

The affair and the end of her marriage inspired Justine’s 2004 book Rien de Grave (published in English in 2005 as Nothing Serious). She paints a vitriolic portrait of “Paula”, the surgically-enhanced model who steals the protagonist’s husband and describes her as “a praying mantis” and “a leech of a woman with a Terminator smile”.

Bruni and Raphaël had a son, Aurélien, in 2001. The couple broke up in May 2007 because Raphaël thought their relationship did not have a commitment, as she told Vanity Fair.

Bruni met recently divorced French president Nicolas Sarkozy in November 2007 at a dinner party. After a brief romance they married on 2 February 2008 at the Élysée Palace in Paris. The marriage is Bruni’s first and Sarkozy’s third. Bruni obtained French nationality not long afterwards. She has since made contradictory statements as to whether she still holds Italian nationality as well