Carla Gilberta Bruni Tedeschi was born in Turin, Italy. Bruni is legally the daughter of Italian concert pianist Marisa Borini and industrialist and classical composer Alberto Bruni Tedeschi. In 2008, however, Bruni told Vanity Fair that her biological father is Italian-born Brazilian grocery magnate Maurizio Remmert. When Remmert met Marisa Borini at a concert in Turin, he was a 19-year-old classical guitarist, and their affair lasted six years. Bruni signed with City Models in 1987, aged 19. Paul Marciano, president and creative director of Guess? Inc, came across her picture among composite cards of aspiring models and chose her to model in campaigns for Guess? jeans, subsequently she worked with many of Europe’s top designers.
In 1997, Bruni quit the world of fashion to devote herself to music. She sent her lyrics to Julien Clerc in 1999, based on which he composed six tracks on his 2000 album Si j’étais elle. In 2002, her debut album Quelqu’un m’a dit, was released in Europe being a surprise hit, selling 2 million copies. In 2004 Carla Bruni won an EBBA Award. Every year the European Border Breakers Awards (EBBA) recognize the success of ten emerging artists or groups who reached audiences outside their own countries with their first internationally released album.
Her second album, No Promises containing poems by Yeates, Dickinson, Auden, De la Mare and Rossetti, set to music, was released in January 2007. Bruni met the recently divorced French president Nicholas Sarkozy in November 2007, at a dinner party. After a brief romance they married in February 2008 at the Elysee Palacee in Paris. The marriage is Bruni’s first and Sarkozy’s third. Bruni obtained French nationality not long afterwards. She continued recording after her marriage. She released her third album Comme si de rien n’etait in July 2008. The songs are self-penned except for one rendition of “You Belong to Me” and another song featuring Michel Houellebecq’s poem La Possibilité d’une île set to music. Royalties from the album are donated to charitable and humanitarian causes.
Bruni sang for Nelson Mandela’s’s 91st birthday in July 2009 at Radio City in New York City. In September 2009, she recorded a duet with Harry Connick Jr. for the French edition of his album Your Songs. They sang The Beatles song ‘And I Love Her’. The album was released in France in October 2009. In April 2013, Bruni’s fourth album Little French Songs was released.
In 2017 she released her 5th studio album, an English-language collection of cover songs produced by legendary producer, composer and musician David Foster entitled French Touch. The first single “Enjoy The Silence,” a stripped down and intimate rendition of the 1990’s Depeche Mode classic.
