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Actor

1985-06-21 · New York City, U.S. · Female

10 series in the catalog

Elizabeth Woolridge Grant (born June 21, 1985), known professionally as Lana Del Rey, is an American singer-songwriter. Her music is noted for its melancholic exploration of romance and glamour, with frequent references to pop culture and 1950s–1970s Americana. She is the recipient of various accolades, including an MTV Video Music Award, three MTV Europe Music Awards, two Brit Awards, two Billboard Women in Music awards, and a Satellite Award, in addition to nominations for 11 Grammy Awards and a Golden Globe Award. Variety honored her at their Hitmakers Awards for being "one of the most influential singer-songwriters of the 21st century". In 2023, Rolling Stone placed Del Rey on their list of the "200 Greatest Singers of All Time", while Rolling Stone UK named her as the "greatest American songwriter of the 21st century".

Del Rey grew up in upstate New York and moved to Manhattan in 2005 to pursue a music career. Del Rey's breakthrough came in 2011 with the viral success of her single "Video Games", leading to a recording contract with Polydor and Interscope. She achieved critical and commercial success with her second album, Born to Die (2012), which featured a moody, hip hop-inflected sound and spawned the sleeper hit "Summertime Sadness". The album topped numerous national charts around the world, and holds the record for the longest charting album by a woman in the history of the US Billboard 200. She subsequently topped the US charts with the albums Ultraviolence (2014) and Lust for Life (2017).

Her critically acclaimed sixth album Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019) was nominated for Album of the Year at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards and listed as one of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" by Rolling Stone. Del Rey's ninth studio album Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd was released in 2023, supported by the critically acclaimed single "A&W", which was named one of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" by Rolling Stone. Later that year, she released the Billboard Global 200 top-20 hit "Say Yes to Heaven".

Del Rey has collaborated on soundtracks for visual media; in 2013, she wrote and starred in the critically acclaimed musical short film Tropico and released "Young and Beautiful" for the romantic drama The Great Gatsby, which was highly praised by critics and received Grammy Award and Critics' Choice Award nominations. In 2014, she recorded "Once Upon a Dream" for the dark fantasy adventure film Maleficent and the titular theme song for the biopic Big Eyes, which was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. Del Rey also recorded the collaboration "Don't Call Me Angel" for the action comedy Charlie's Angels (2019). In 2020, Del Rey published the poetry and photography collection Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass. In 2026, she collaborated with veteran James Bond composer David Arnold on the title soundtrack for the video game 007: First Light, releasing a song of the same name.

Early life and education

Elizabeth Woolridge Grant was born on June 21, 1985 in Manhattan, to Robert England Grant Jr., a copywriter at Grey Global Group, and Patricia Ann "Pat" Grant (née Hill), an account executive at the same organization. She has a younger sister, Caroline "Chuck" Grant, and a younger brother, Charlie Grant. She grew up Catholic and is of Scottish and English descent. When she was a year old, the family moved to Lake Placid, New York. In Lake Placid, her father worked for a furniture company before becoming an entrepreneurial domain investor; her mother worked as a schoolteacher. There, she attended St. Agnes School in her elementary years and began singing in her church choir, where she was the cantor.

She attended the high school where her mother taught for a year, but when she was 14 or 15, her parents sent her to Kent School, an Episcopal boarding school in Kent, Connecticut to get sober from alcoholism. Alcoholism, along with drugs, had been a problem that started in her teenage years and had become so serious that her entire family, including Grant herself, was worried. Grant shared in an interview: "That's really why I got sent to boarding school aged 14—to get sober." Her uncle, an admissions officer at the school, secured her financial aid to attend. According to Grant, she had trouble making friends during much of her teenage and early adult years. She has said she was preoccupied with death from a young age, and its role in her feelings of anxiety and alienation: When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn't believe that we were mortal. For some reason that knowledge sort of overshadowed my experience. I was unhappy for some time. I got into a lot of trouble. I used to drink a lot. That was a hard time in my life.

Grant later dropped out of school to go to rehab; she has been sober since 2003. She spent a year living on Long Island with her aunt and uncle and working as a waitress. Grant, also briefly worked as a model, signed to Ford. During that time, Grant's uncle taught her to play guitar and she "realized [that she] could probably write a million songs with those six chords". Shortly after, she began writing songs and performing in nightclubs around the city under various names such as "Sparkle Jump Rope Queen" and "Lizzy Grant and the Phenomena". "I was always singing, but didn't plan on pursuing it seriously", she said:When I got to New York City when I was eighteen, I started playing in clubs in Brooklyn—I have good friends and devoted fans on the underground scene, but we were playing for each other at that point—and that was it.She originally attended State University of New York at Geneseo, but dropped out to take a gap year. In fall 2004, at age 19, Grant enrolled at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York where she majored in philosophy with an emphasis on metaphysics. She has said she chose to study the subject because it "bridged the gap between God and science... I was interested in God and how technology could bring us closer to finding out where we came from and why."

Career

2005–2010: Career beginnings and early recordings

In spring 2005, while still in college, Del Rey registered a seven-track extended play with the United States Copyright Office; the application title was Rock Me Stable with another title, Young Like Me, also listed. A second extended play, From the End, was also recorded under Del Rey's stage name at the time, May Jailer. Between 2005 and 2006 she recorded an acoustic album, Sirens, under the May Jailer project, which leaked on the internet in mid-2012.

At her first public performance in 2006 in the Williamsburg Live Songwriting Competition, Del Rey met Van Wilson, an A&R representative for 5 Points Records, an independent label owned by David Nichtern. In 2007, while a senior at Fordham, she submitted a demo tape of acoustic tracks, No Kung Fu, to 5 Points, which offered her a recording contract for $10,000. She used the money to move to Manhattan Mobile Home Park, a trailer park in North Bergen, New Jersey and began working with producer David Kahne. Nichtern recalled: "Our plan was to get it all organized and have a record to go and she'd be touring right after she graduated from college. Like a lot of artists, she morphed. When she first came to us, she was playing plunky little acoustic guitar, [had] sort of straight blonde hair, very cute young woman. A little bit dark, but very intelligent. We heard that. But she very quickly kept evolving."

Del Rey graduated from Fordham with a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy in 2008 after which she released a three-track EP, Kill Kill, as Lizzy Grant, featuring production by Kahne. She explained: "David asked to work with me only a day after he got my demo. He is known as a producer with a lot of integrity and who had an interest in making music that wasn't just pop."…