Eddy de Pretto

Eddy de Pretto was born on 2 May 1993 and grew up in Créteil[3][2] in the Val-de-Marne.[4] His father is a truck driver and football fan; his mother a laboratory technician and an art lover.[5] He sings about his native city in Beaulieue.[6] In an interview, he described his hometown:

...a certain amount of anger, a desire to better myself. There's a bit of a sort of straightjacket in the banlieues, like it or not: we're told we're on the margin, that we'll amount to nothing, that we'll come to a bad end. Me, my head was full of dreams and a little voice told me I'd get there. The desire to overcome [it all] helped me succeed...

[7]

At the age of twelve, he started lessons in theatre, singing, vocal technique and piano:[8] "I took the TV remote for a microphone and operated a halogen lamp for lighting. So my mother suggested taking theatre lessons since I didn't excel at sport."[7] He continued his education at the Institut supérieur des arts de la scène (ECM-ISAS, "Advanced Institute of Dramatic Arts") in Paris.[2]

Eddy de Pretto's first acting experiences were in TV advertisements, such as the role of a young Julius Caesar for CanalSat in September 2010,[9][10] before entering into the theatrical and film worlds: the short films Königsberg by Philipp Mayrhofer in 2012 and Vivre sa vie by Paul D. Meyer in 2013 as well as an appearance in the feature film Paulette by Jérôme Enrico in the role of "the young hippy buyer", also in 2013.

Between the ages of eighteen and nineteen he began to write songs. In his first public performance he sang R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly" at his local youth centre (Maison des jeunes et de la culture): "I was totally weak, ... so stressed out because there was a lot of rap and I didn't fit into that genre at all," he said in an interview.[11]

He participated in the Printemps de Bourges music festival, where he won the Inouïs ("unheard of, amazing") prize,[12] and the Bars en Trans festival, and is a graduate of inRocKs Lab 2016.[2] In October 2017, he also took part in the Festival Off Off Off (Nuits de Champagne festival) in Troyes.[13]

As alluded to in some of his songs, Eddy de Pretto does not hide his homosexuality: "I'm not militant. I don't want to be a standard-bearer. I just want to give an account of my life, my reality," he added in an interview.[11] He defines himself as a "non-genre" artist.[24] In the TV program Taratata, broadcast on 15 December 2017, he explained that he was trying to examine masculinity and the hypermasculinity that made up part of his education. When Nagui asked him if he talked about homosexuality in his songs, he responded that that was in no way his goal.[25] In this regard, speaking to Les Inrockuptibles the singer declared: "I try to speak about my personal history and to normalise it as much as possible. And not to highlight it saying I'm the first queer to link rap and French chanson".[2]

• Official website
• Eddy de Pretto at IMDb