Grace Jones Biography
Grace Beverly Jones is a Jamaican-American model, singer, songwriter, record producer, and actress.
Born in Jamaica, she moved when she was 13, along with her siblings, to live with her parents in Syracuse, New York. Jones began her modeling career in New York state, then in Paris, appearing on the covers of Elle and Vogue.
Beverly Grace Jones is a Jamaican singer and actress who was nominated for the Saturn Awards for Best Supporting Actress for her role ‘Conan the Destroyer’, ‘A View to a Kill’, and ‘Vamp’.
She is also a Grammy Award-nominated musician. A bold girl from an early age, she moved to Philadelphia with a drama professor to work in a play when she was in college.
Grace Jones moved to Paris and joined the fashion industry. The fact that she was not a conventional beauty did not deter the young woman from pursuing a modeling career.
Thankfully, the fashion scene in Paris was open towards welcoming her unconventional androgynous looks, dark skin and bony structure into a world dominated by curvy, feminine, and pretty women.
Grace Jones modeled successfully for the likes of Yves St. Laurent, Claude Montana and Kenzo Takada. As a model, she was also on the constant lookout for acting opportunities and appeared in a string of low budget movies.
The talented woman is a skilled musician who was a part of the ‘New Wave’ movement in the late 1970s. Some of her hit singles include ‘Pull Up to the Bumper’, ‘I’ve Seen That Face Before’, and ‘Slave to the Rhythm’
Grace Jones Age & Early Life
Grace Jones photo
Grace Jones was born in 1948 in Spanish Town, Jamaica, She attended the Pentecostal All Saints School, before being sent to a nearby public school.
As a child, shy Jones had only one schoolfriend and was teased by classmates for her “skinny frame”, but she excelled at sports and found solace in the nature of Jamaica.
at the age of 13 Grace and her family relocated in the US, where her parents had settled in Lyncourt, Salina, New York, near Syracuse. It was in the city that her father had established his own ministry, the Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ, in 1956.
Jones continued her schooling and after she graduated, enrolled at Onondaga Community College majoring in Spanish. Jones began to rebel against her parents and their religion;
Grace jones began wearing makeup, drinking alcohol, and visiting gay clubs with her brother. At college, she also took a theatre class, with her drama teacher convincing her to join him on a summer stock tour in Philadelphia.
In the city, she decided to stay there, immersing herself in the Counterculture of the 1960s by living in hippie communes, earning money as a go-go dancer, and using LSD and other drugs.
She later praised the use of LSD as “a very important part of my emotional growth. The mental exercise was good for me”.
Grace Jones Modelling Career
Grace moved back to New York at 18 and signed on as a model with Wilhelmina Modelling agency. She moved to Paris in 1970. The Parisian fashion scene was receptive to Jones’ unusual, androgynous, bold, dark-skinned appearance.
Yves St. Laurent, Claude Montana, and Kenzo Takada hired her for runway modeling. And she appeared on the covers of Elle, Vogue, and Stern working with Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, and Hans Feurer.
Jones also modeled for Azzedine Alaia and was frequently photographed promoting his line. While modeling in Paris, she shared an apartment with Jerry Hall and Jessica Lange.
Hall and Jones frequented Le Sept, one of Paris’s most popular gay clubs of the 1970s and ’80s, and socialized with Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld. In 1973, Jones appeared on the cover of a reissue of Billy Paul’s 1970 album Ebony Woman.
Grace Jones Music Career
Jones was signed by Island Records, who put her in the studio with disco record producer, Tom Moulton. Moulton worked at Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia, and Portfolio was released in 1977.
The album featured three songs from Broadway musicals, “Send in the Clowns” by Stephen Sondheim from A Little Night Music, “What I Did for Love” from A Chorus Line and “Tomorrow” from Annie.
The second side of the album opens up with a seven-minute reinterpretation of Édith Piaf’s “La Vie en rose” followed by three new recordings, two of which were co-written by Jones, “Sorry”, and “That’s the Trouble”.
The album finished with “I Need a Man”, Jones’ first club hit. The artwork to the album was designed by Richard Bernstein, an artist for Interview. In 1978, Jones and Moulton made Fame, an immediate follow-up to Portfolio also recorded at Sigma Sound Studios.
The album featured another reinterpretation of a French classic, “Autumn Leaves” by Jacques Prévert. The Canadian edition of the vinyl album included another French language track, “Comme un oiseau qui s’envole”, which replaced “All on a Summers Night”;
In most locations, this song served as the B-side of the single “Do or Die”. In the North American club scene, Fame was a hit album and the “Do or Die”/”Pride”/”Fame” side reached top 10 on both the US Hot Dance Club Play and Canadian Dance/Urban charts.
The album was released on compact disc in the early 1990s but soon went out of print. In 2011, it was released and remastered by Gold Legion, a record company that specializes in reissuing classic disco albums on CD. Jones’ live shows were highly sexualized.
“Muse was the last of Jones’ disco albums. The album features a re-recorded version “I’ll Find My Way to You”, which Jones released three years prior to Muse.
Originally appearing in the 1976 Italian film, Colt 38 Special Squad in which Jones had a role as a club singer, Jones also recorded a song called “Again and Again” that was featured in the film.
Both songs were produced by composer Stelvio Cipriani. Icelandic keyboardist Thor Baldursson arranged most of the album and also sang a duet with Jones on the track “Suffer”.
Grace Jones Nightclubbing
The 1981 release of Nightclubbing included Jones’ covers of songs by Flash and the Pan , Bill Withers (“Use Me”), Iggy Pop/David Bowie (“Nightclubbing”) and Ástor Piazzolla .
Three songs were co-written by Jones: “Feel Up”, “Art Groupie” and “Pull Up to the Bumper”. Sting wrote “Demolition Man”; he later recorded it with The Police on the album Ghost in the Machine.
“I’ve Done It Again” was written by Marianne Faithfull. The strong rhythm featured on Nightclubbing was produced by Compass Point All-Stars, including Sly and Robbie, Wally Badarou, Mikey Chung, Uzziah “Sticky” Thompson, and Barry Reynolds.
The album entered in the Top 5 in four countries and became Jones’ highest-ranking record on the US Billboard mainstream albums and R&B charts.
Nightclubbing claimed the number 1 slot on NME’s Album of the Year list. Slant Magazine listed the album at No. 40 on its list of Best Albums of the 1980s. Nightclubbing is now widely considered Jones’ best studio album.
The album’s cover art is a painting of Jones by Jean-Paul Goude. Jones is presented as a man wearing an Armani suit jacket, with a cigarette in her mouth and a flattop haircut.
While promoting the album, Jones slapped chat-show host Russell Harty live on air after he had turned to interview other guests, making Jones feel she was being ignored.
Grace Jones Acting Career
In 1990, Jones appeared as herself in the documentary, Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol. 1992 saw Jones starring as Helen Strangé, in the Eddie Murphy film Boomerang,
In 1996, Jones released “Love Bites”, an up-tempo electronic track to promote the Sci-Fi Channel’s Vampire Week, which consisted of a series of vampire-themed films aired on the channel in early November 1996.
The track features Jones singing from the perspective of a vampire. The track was released as a non-label promo-only single. To this day, it has not been made commercially available.
In June 1998, she was scheduled to release an album entitled Force of Nature, on which she worked with trip-hop musician Tricky. The release of Force of Nature was canceled due to a disagreement between the two.
Grace Jones in 1998 was cast in the Avengers, and in 1999, appeared in an episode of the Beastmaster television series as the Umpatra Warrior. In 2001, Jones starred in the made-for-television film, Wolf Girl as an intersex circus performer named Christoph/Christine.
Grace Jones Family
Grace Jones daughter of Marjorie and Robert W. Jones, who was a local politician and Apostolic clergyman. The couple already had two children and would go on to have four more.
Robert and Marjorie moved to the East Coast of the United States, where Robert worked as an agricultural laborer until a spiritual experience during a suicide attempt inspired him to become a Pentecostal minister.
While they were in the US, they left their children with Marjorie’s mother and her new husband, Peart. She was raised into the family’s Pentecostal faith, having to take part in prayer meetings and Bible readings every night.
Jones’ father was strict and their relationship was strained. According to his particular denomination’s beliefs, one should only use one’s singing ability to glorify God. Bishop Robert W. Jones died on 7 May 2008.
Her mother, Marjorie, always supported Jones’ career (she sings on “Williams’ Blood” and “My Jamaican Guy”) but could not be publicly associated with her music. Marjorie’s father, William, was also a musician and played with Nat King Cole.
Jones described her childhood as having been “crushed underneath the Bible”, and since has refused to enter a Jamaican church due to her bad childhood experiences.
Grace Jones Brother
Jones’ brother is megachurch preacher Bishop Noel Jones, who starred on the 2013 reality show Preachers of LA. In June 1994, Noel was chosen to succeed Bishop Robert W. McMurray as pastor to approximately.
1,000 members of the Greater Bethany Community Church, located at 84th & Hoover Street in South Los Angeles, California. During his tenure, the membership of the church has increased so significantly that, in 2003, a new building was acquired in Gardena, California.
The new sanctuary, now known as “The City of Refuge”, accommodates a growing membership of 17,000. The church has a choir known as the City of Refuge Sanctuary Choir.
Their 2007 debut album, Welcome to the City, charted on the Billboard 200 chart and made number one on the Billboard Top Gospel Albums chart.
Grace Jones Husband
Through her relationship with longtime collaborator Jean-Paul Goude, Jones has one son, Paulo. From Paulo, Jones has one granddaughter. Jones married Atila Altaunbay in 1996.
She disputes rumors that 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
Grace Jones Dolph Lundgren
Grace Jones spent four years with Swedish actor Dolph Lundgren, her former bodyguard; she was the one who got him apart as a KGB officer in A View to a Kill.
Dolph Lundgren was born 3 November 1957, better known as Dolph Lundgren, is a Swedish actor, filmmaker, and martial artist. Lundgren’s breakthrough came in 1985, when he starred in Rocky IV as the imposing Soviet Union boxer Ivan Drago.
Since then, he has starred in more than 40 films, almost all of them in the action genre.
Grace Jones Sven-Ole Thorsen
Grace Jones started dating Danish actor and stuntman Sven-Ole Thorsen in 1990 and was in an open relationship as of 2007.Sven-Ole Thorsen (born 24 September 1944) is a Danish actor, stuntman, bodybuilder and strongman competitor.
Thorsen won Denmark’s Strongest Man in 1983. Using his stature he often plays imposing giants and villains in his films who are somehow beaten by smaller opponents in a David and Goliath manner.
But he has also played heroic characters such as Gunnar the legendary warrior in The Viking Sagas. His autobiography Stærk mand I Hollywood was published on 26 October 2007 and was very well-reviewed. The first printing of the book reportedly sold out in 24 hours.
Grace Jones James Bond
Grace Jones starred as May Day Zorin’s lover and chief henchwoman in the James Bond series a view to kill. She seemingly possesses superhuman strength.
A 1985 American-British spy film and the fourteenth in the James Bond film series produced by Eon Productions, and both the seventh and the last to star Roger Moore as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond.
Although the title is adapted from Ian Fleming’s short story “From a View to a Kill”, the film has an entirely original screenplay. In A View to a Kill, Bond is pitted against Max Zorin, who plans to destroy California’s Silicon Valley.
Grace Jones Net Worth
Grace Jones has graced every aspect of showbiz and has been successful in all of them. From modeling to music to on-screen acting, she has never let her background be an inhibition in her aim to be the best in all her endeavors.
According to some online sources, she has an estimated net worth of $ 7 Million at present. The majority of her income comes from her career as a model, singer, and songwriter. She also owns a house in Somerset, London.
She also owns a McLaren 650s Spider which costs around $ 280,255. Her versatility in the entertainment industry brought with it financial rewards as well. Her net worth is estimated at $7 million which enables her super luxurious lifestyle.
Grace Jones Songs
Day Weekend (song)
Amado Mio
The Apple Stretching
Breakdown (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song)
Corporate Cannibal
Crush (Grace Jones song)
Cry Now, Laugh Later
Demolition Man (song)
Do or Die (Grace Jones song)
Evilmainya
The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game
Hurricane (Cradle to the Grave)
I Need a Man (Grace Jones song)
I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect for You)
I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango)
Jones the Rhythm
Living My Life (song)
Love Bites (Grace Jones song)
Love Is the Drug
Love on Top of Love
Love You to Life
My Jamaican Guy
Nightclubbing (song)
Nipple to the Bottle
Grace Jones 2019
Grace Jones puts on a quirky display in a black PVC corset and fishnet tights as she takes to the stage at Brighton Pride
5 August 2019
She is known for her eye-catching ensembles and sartorial prowess. And Grace Jones ensured all eyes were on her once again as she took to the stage at Brighton & Hove Pride in Preston Park on Sunday.
The American singer, 71, made sure her performance was once to remember as she sang her hits in a black PVC corset underneath a billowing cape and a pair fishnet tights rolled up to her thighs.
The Slave To The Rhythm hitmaker teamed her ensemble with a pair of black stiletto heels and a spectacular skull-shaped gold mask that boasted feathers at the top.
Decorating her skin with white body paint, the star accessorized her look with an array of colorful bands tied around her wrists and ankles.