Grace Jones is a Jamaican singer, songwriter, lyricist, supermodel, record producer, and actress. Born in Jamaica, at age 13 she moved with her siblings to their parents' home in Syracuse, New York. Jones began her modelling career in New York state, then in Paris, working for fashion houses such as Yves St. Laurent and Kenzo, and appearing on the covers of Elle and Vogue.
Background
She was bom Grace Mendoza on May 19,1952, in Spanish Town, Jamaica, where her grandfather and father were Pentecostal ministers and influential in local politics. The stern upbringing she described in an interview perhaps influenced her defiant nature: "It was a very strict religious upbringing. I couldn't even listen to the radio". However, her home was also the first source of her athleticism and musicality. Like her mother, who had been a track and field Olympic contender, Grace's participation in sports included 100-meter races, high jump, and hurdles. The family was also musical: her mother sang, two uncles played and taught piano, and one of her grandfathers had a jazz band. Her musical talent, mutilingualism, and striking looks made her stand out among the other children in her school in Syracuse, New York, where her family moved when she was 12.
Education
In the early 1970s, after graduating high school and studying theater at Syracuse University, she became a successful model working out of Paris and appeared on the covers of fashion magazines such as Vogue, Elk, and Der Stern.
Career
Her strolls on the Parisian catwalks were spectacles and marked the beginning of her move toward music and performance art. Seemingly an objet d'art, Grace's look made her one of the most sought-after, jet-setting models in the fashion world. This visibility and recognition led to an offer by a record company to make her first album in 1977, aptly titled Portfolio.
Portfolio included the smash hit, "I Need a Man," a song she at times performed wearing a wedding dress with suspenders. "La Vie en Rose," another big hit on that album, is considered a disco classic. She built an underground following as a cult figure and singer in New York City's gay dance clubs of the 1970s. There she developed a reputation for her roguish stylish look and the dominatrix, sexually suggestive, genderbending theatricalities that were characteristic of her performances, such as entering the stage on a motorcycle dressed in leather with bodybuilders and/or male strippers dancing at her side, and sharing the stage with wild animals. Once, at the Savoy Club in New York, a man handcuffed himself to her ankle, and without missing a beat, she bent him over for a spanking while the audience danced in syncopation and cheered. Even though her music was widely known and played in the major U.S. discos, most of her albums regularly reached no higher than the lower end of the Billboard s Top 100, unlike in Britain and the rest of Europe, where her recordings were among the top-ten hits.
During the 1980s, disco's popularity waned and Jones moved toward rhythm and blues (R&B), soul, and rock music. Her Warm Leatherette recording was the beginning of her more rock-oriented music. In 1981, in collaboration with rock musicians David Bowie and Iggy Pop, she released Night Clubbing, an album that included her biggest R&B single, "Pull Up to the Bumper," marking her highest achievement in American R&B. The recording was also voted album of the year by England's New Musical Express. However, she is probably best known for her 1985 song "Slave to the Rhythm," and for her 1986 single "I'm Not Perfect (But I'm Perfect For You)." Both were commercial successes and dance-club classics. Critics have described her music as having foreshadowed and helped to define the "new music," which combined different genres such as rock, jazz, blues, and reggae, into the innovative music sounds that followed. Her Private Life: The Compass Point Sessions, which compiles music from three earlier albums, is a good example of this. A Spin Magazine review noted that "Jones bore her status as Diaspora artist proudly, putting across white rock songs and cabaret tunes with few of the emotional signifiers of either Rasta or Pop".
Her film career also began during this time. Among her most memorable film appearances was her 1984 role alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger as "Zula" the warrior woman in Conan the Destroyer and as the man-eating villain in the James Bond film A View to Kill in 1986. Cast in a leading role in the little-known movie Vamp, she dominated the screen without uttering a single word. In 1988 she penned a song for, and made an appearance in, comedian Eddie Murphy's film Boomerang. It was during this time, the height of her career, that she lost many fans, friends, and collaborators in the music business to the AIDS epidemic. Increasingly from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, the difficulties in her life escalated to the point where she found herself battling personal problems and did not record much music.
Today, her disco days behind, Jones still retains a timeless appeal and following/ particularly among the world's gay community. Feeling total acceptance from the community that embraced her music early on, she describes them as her "best audience," and her performance schedule includes gay clubs. In 1993 her dance/ techno single "Sex Drive" reached the number-one spot on the USA Billboard Chart. More recently she has recorded a number of soundtracks, among the more successful are "Evilmania" for the film Freddy the Frog and "Let Joy and Innocence Prevail" for Toys. In addition, in 1997, she played the character Evilene in the national tour of the Broadway show The Wiz.
Achievements
Grace Jones resides in Paris and continues her gender-bending performances throughout the world. In 1999, VH1 named her one of the 100 Greatest Women of Rock 'n' Roll. Hurricane, billed as her "comeback" recording, was released in late 2000. She completed a film in Romania and was featured in the BBC's documentary Legends of Dance, and a newly recorded version of "Pull Up to the Bumper" made the Top-10 Billboard Dance Chart.
Through her relationship with long-time collaborator Jean-Paul Goude, Jones has one son, Paulo. From Paulo, Jones has one granddaughter. Jones married Atila Altaunbay in 1996. She disputes rumors she married Chris Stanley in her 2015 memoir I'll Never Write My Memoirs, saying, "The truth is, I only ever married one of my boyfriends, Atila Altaunbay, a Muslim from Turkey." She spent four years with Swedish actor Dolph Lundgren, her former bodyguard; she was the one who got him a part as a KGB officer in A View to a Kill. Jones started dating Danish actor/stuntman/bodybuilder Sven-Ole Thorsen in 1990, and was in an open relationship as of 2007.
