Rita Ora’s Rise to Fame
Today, Rita Ora is short of words: “If you want to know what my new album You & I is about, just listen to it: it’s all in there“. That same evening she will perform, accompanied by an orchestra and wearing an ultra-staged white dress, at the AmfAR gala, the NGO that since 1985 has been committed to research for the cure against AIDS. She is warming up her voice for the performance, she has little time and little desire to talk, but she lights up when she talks about Venice: “It’s the first time I’m here and it’s all incredibly beautiful, it seems to me to be inside a movie set. My parents came here on their honeymoon and today I’m here with my husband”. Her husband is the New Zealand director Taika Waititi, married in secret last summer: she spoke for the first time about the marriage only in January of this year and even now she carefully avoids the subject. It is easy to guess why: since she made her grand entrance into show business, Rita Ora has had to face all kinds of gossip and malice.
Rita Ora’s Music Career
It was 2012 when her first single, Hot Right Now, debuted at the top of the British charts, two years after being noticed by Jay-Z, her great sponsor. Today she compares her sudden rise in the music industry to “roller coasters“. And since then the feeling has never changed: “I feel like I’m on a roller coaster every single day of my life and it’s a fantastic feeling”. But she still looks at fame with detachment: “Since I was little, my parents taught me the importance of hard work and how to earn everything. Growing up, I always dreamed of what kind of career I would build, but I never thought a girl like me, an immigrant from Kosovo, would be here today. Being here in Venice to perform at AmfAR is such a beautiful moment and it serves to remind me not to take anything for granted”.
Rita Ora’s Family
She had arrived in London from Kosovo with her family at the age of one. Not an easy life, as immigrants who have to start from scratch in a foreign country, but this does not prevent Rita from nurturing the dream of becoming a pop star, with the support of her parents, a psychiatrist mother and a pub owner father: “They supported me a lot, my mother is a dreamer, my father wanted me to study, they have always been on my side”. In particular, her mother, the female role model par excellence: “She is my role model. Today I am much more than a singer. I work in TV, cinema and fashion, and my empire of businesswoman is based on being strong and independent in managing my business. And this way of doing things I owe it to my mother, who has always been a very independent woman and has always worked very hard”.
