The film — which opened Friday and stars writer-director Bradley Cooper alongside Gaga — is the third take on “A Star Is Born.” Previous incarnations of the film followed a similar plot: a famous troubled man discovers an immensely talented woman, they fall in love, and she goes from a nobody to a sensation overnight while he battles his demons.
This version, however, departs from previous ones in the emotional dynamics between the two leads.
Some who viewed the trailer were taken aback by the idea that Lady Gaga would be playing a character, who was rejected for her appearance.
Are A Star Is Born commercials trying to build a story around the idea that ... Lady Gaga is ugly? Is that something people think? I don’t understand this movie.
— Samantha Swindler (@editorswindler) September 21, 2018
The biggest thing I don't get about the movie A Star Is Born is that the premise is Lady Gaga is ugly
— JJ (@J_Shawww) September 30, 2018
Heartwarming that Bradley Coopers character in A Star is Born is able to love Lady Gaga despite her hideously ugly body and face.
— Amy Miller (@amymiller) October 3, 2018
while we're hanging out in political purgatory, can I just ask why none of us are dunking on a star is born? The movie where we are all supposed to believe Lady Gaga is an Ugly because she has a nose, I guess??
— Rebecca Caplan (@NotThatReba) September 28, 2018
In the trailer, Gaga’s character, Ally, is heard saying “Almost every single person has told me they like the way I sounded, but they don’t like the way I look.”
Gaga, who is one of the world’s biggest pop stars, unabashedly performs in elaborate costumes (meat dress!) and puts on eye-popping stunts (Super Bowl halftime show, anyone?). She’s a killer songwriter, too. So it feels a little ludicrous that she wouldn’t sing her own songs — as Ally also says in the trailer — or would be told she could never make it as a musician because the way she looks.
Born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, she learned to play the piano at age 4, and by 14 she was performing at open mic nights in her hometown of New York City. She also took acting classes in Lee Strasberg’s method and was cast in student productions while attending an all-girls Catholic school.
In later interviews, she mentioned being bullied, including the time a group of boys threw her into a New York City trash can. “I don’t think I realized how deeply bullying affected me until later in life,” she said in a 2011 MTV documentary.
At 17, she received early admission at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, but she dropped out to try to make a go of it as a musician, playing Lower East Side clubs and getting signed to Def Jam Records, only to be dropped several months later. She’d eventually sign on with Interscope, writing songs for the Pussycat Dolls, Britney Spears and New Kids on the Block.
“She was young, skinny, and blonde, but she had a prominent Italian nose, the kind of nose that rarely survives on a starlet,” reads a 2010 profile in New York Magazine.
According to the profile, Gaga at one point believed her label didn’t think she was pretty enough, and one day at the Beauty Bar in New York, she told friend Brendan Sullivan, (also known as DJ VH1) that she was going to get a nose job.
Sullivan told the outlet that he pleaded with her to be reasonable, and he described Andy Warhol’s “Before and After I,” which depicts two noses (one with rhinoplasty) with the word “raped” on top. Gaga went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see it (Warhol also influences her approach to music and art).
Then, rapper Akon met Gaga and was impressed by her vocal talent and the persona she had cultivated. He signed her to his imprint on Interscope. Her debut album, “The Fame,” became her breakout.
Other parts of Gaga’s biography directly influenced “A Star Is Born.” Jackson Maine (Cooper) meets Ally in a drag bar, where she’s the only woman who performs. In the scene, she’s singing “La Vie en Rose.”
“I would often say to Lady Gaga, ‘This is a movie about what would have happened if you didn’t make it until you were 31 instead of 21,’” Cooper told Vogue. “We talked a lot about where she started on the Lower East Side, and she told me about this drag bar where she used to hang, and I thought, Oh, this is just ripe for the story.”
For much of the movie, Gaga sheds all of her Lady Gaga-ness, transforming into the vulnerable, raw and guarded Ally. Despite her ability to relate to Ally, Gaga has also said that “she’s very different than I was.”
“I mean, when I was 19 years old and I decided — you know, my friends were calling me Gaga when I was out singing in clubs, and I was like, ‘I’m going to be Lady Gaga’ — I knew I had something to say. I wanted to say it,” Gaga told Stephen Colbert last week. “I wanted to knock on every door. I was dragging my keyboard around New York City, banging on everyone’s door. I was pretending to be my own manager to get gigs.”
Gaga continued: “I just was working it and doing everything I could. I really believed in myself, but my character in this film, Ally, she’s not that way. She’s in her 30s, and she’s given up. She doesn’t believe in herself.”
Ally is “incredibly insecure, and she’s lacking in self-confidence,” Gaga said. “And it’s meeting Jackson, or Jack, as she calls him in the film, it’s his love for her and his belief in her that gives her wings to fly.”
