“There’s no such thing as age! I haven’t celebrated my birthdays for a long time,” Amanda Lear confides to AFP, returning to the theater as an unworthy old lady in a tailor-made adaptation of The Old Lady’s Money, an Italian film by Luigi Comencini released in 1972. ” We only ask actresses their age, never actors. It’s still a sexist thing!”, believes the singer and actress who maintains the vagueness about her date of birth, to the point that Who’s Who in France refuses to publish her biographical notice, like that of Arielle Dombasle for the same reason .
“On Wikipedia, it’s nonsense! They give me 84 years old. And why not a hundred years old, while we’re at it?” she gets carried away, recalling that it was Salvador Dali, whose muse she was, who taught her “to create mystery”. “Dali was a wonderful school of advertising. He liked to provoke so much, to respond off the mark. Artists need to be talked about,” adds Amanda Lear (Amanda Tapp, civil registry). “The more people ask about you, the more buzz there is and the more interesting you are. There needs to be some mystery. Never respond, that’s the secret! And I had a wonderful career.”
“They say I’ve had fifteen facelifts. I challenge any doctor: they won’t find any scars! I will never have a facelift,” assures the woman who nevertheless admits to resorting to “experimental treatments to slow down aging.” “To all mature women”, she urges “to move to stay in shape”. “We’re not expired like yogurt!”
Despite saying goodbye in 2016 because she was “tired of showbiz”, the interpreter of Follow Me (a global hit from 1978 recently brought up to date by Chanel in an advertisement) multiplies the roles in the theater.
Also read: The Old Woman’s Money at the Théâtre libre: Amanda Lear as the Queen of Spades
After portraying Joan Crawford in an imaginary conversation with Bette Davis, Amanda Lear plays a cantankerous and cynical billionaire. A role of extreme proportions created on stage by Alice Sapritch in 1981. The wealthy heiress faces a couple who are as penniless as they are Machiavellian, who desperately try to rebuild their lives during card games.
“I play a kind of Liliane Bettencourt that we try to exploit, but the difference is that she is very manipulative. Beyond vaudeville, it is also a serious subject between rich and poor,” underlines the actress, on the bill at the Théâtre Libre in Paris, before a tour next year.
“Theatre is a discipline. It’s my therapy. It makes me feel good but I can no longer play the seductress, I have to be reasonable. I dreamed of playing an unpleasant woman and, there, all the characters are awful, dirty and mean,” she summarizes.
Amanda Lear is also in the cast of the film Retirement Home 2 by Claude Zidi Jr., with Kev Adams and Jean Reno, in theaters since Wednesday. The one who was enlisted for a Spanish series on Netflix also joined the cast of the series Escort Boys by Ruben Alves for Prime Video, with Carole Bouquet and Rossy de Palma. “American producers want to make a biopic about my life,” she says. “I told them I wasn’t dead yet!”
