Lady Gaga, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta

An avid actor in high school musicals, Gaga portrayed the lead roles of Adelaide in Guys and Dolls and Philia in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. both at Regis High School. She also appeared in a very small role as a mischievous classmate in the television drama series The Sopranos in a 2001 episode titled "The Telltale Moozadell". At 16, she began to sing and play in front of live audiences and unsuccessfully auditioned for parts in New York shows. When her time at the Convent of the Sacred Heart came to an end, her mother encouraged her to apply to New York University to study drama and performance – specifically the Collaborative Arts Project 21 (CAP21), which is a faculty of the Tisch School of the Arts.
Aged 17, Gaga gained early admission and lived in a NYU dorm on 11th Street. There, she studied music and sharpened her songwriting skills by composing essays and analytical papers focusing on topics such as art, religion, social issues and politics. Gaga wrote a thesis on pop artists Spencer Tunick and Damien Hirst; research that prepared her for her future career focus in "music, art, sex and celebrity." Gaga felt that she was more creative than some of her classmates. "Once you learn how to think about art, you can teach yourself," she said. Being part of such a prestigious performance course, Gaga tried for and passed auditions while at CAP21, including the part of an unsuspecting diner customer where MTV's Boiling Points, a prank reality television show, was being filmed. However, by the second semester of her sophomore year, she withdrew from the school to focus on her musical career. Her father agreed to pay her rent for a year, on the condition that she re-enroll at Tisch if she was unsuccessful. "I left my entire family, got the cheapest apartment I could find, and ate shit until somebody would listen," she said.
• 2005–07: Career beginnings
Settled in a small apartment on Rivington Street towards the summer of 2005, Gaga recorded a couple of songs with hip-hop singer Grandmaster Melle Mel, for an audio book accompanying the children's book The Portal in the Park, by Cricket Casey. She also began a band called the Stefani Germanotta Band (SGBand) with some friends from NYU – guitarist Calvin Pia, bassist Eli Silverman and drummer Alex Beckham – in September of that year. The band played a mixture of songs: some self-penned, along with classic rock numbers like Led Zeppelin's "D'yer Mak'er". Playing in Lower East Side bars like The Bitter End and the Mercury Lounge, the band developed a small fan base and caught the eye of music producer Joe Vulpis. Soon after arranging time in Vulpis' studio beneath a New Jersey liquor store in the months that followed, SGBand were selling their extended plays Words and Red and Blue at gigs around New York while becoming a local fixture of the downtown Lower East Side club scene.