![]() ![]() embassy for seven months when the Gulf War broke out. In 1990 Mika's father went on a business trip to Kuwait and became trapped in the U.S. At the age of 7, he wrote his first song, a piano instrumental called "Angry", which he describes as "awful". The first piano piece the young Mika learned to play was " Les Champs-Élysées", by Joe Dassin. "With the pencil-striped trousers and the hat that I had to wear to school. "I was brought up as a Parisian boy, you know," Mika said in an interview. The family lived happily for a time in Paris. When Mika was a year old, his family was forced to leave war-torn Lebanon and moved to Paris, France. Mika's maternal grandfather John Mouakad was Syrian (from Damascus). His father's father – Mika's paternal grandfather William Frederick Penniman III – was a diplomat. ![]() Mika's father was a banker born in Jerusalem. His parents are an American-born Lebanese-Syrian mother (Mary Joan "Joannie", née Mouakad, daughter of John Mouakad and Odette Farah) and an American father (Michael Holbrook Penniman, son of William Frederick Penniman III and Dorothy Dyar). On 18 August 1983, Mika was born in Beirut, the third of five children-he has two older sisters, Yasmine and Paloma, a younger sister Zuleika, and a younger brother, Fortuné. Life and career 1983–2006: Childhood and early career In addition to his musical career, Mika has also worked as a visual artist and designer on various projects, among them sunglasses for the Italian eyewear company Lozza, a clothing line for Belgian retailer JBC, pens for the 100th anniversary of Pilot, and (along with his sister Yasmine) three watches for Swiss company Swatch. In 2022, he co-hosted the Eurovision Song Contest alongside Italian singer Laura Pausini and Italian television presenter Alessandro Cattelan. Mika also starred for two seasons in his own television variety show in Italy, Stasera Casa Mika, which won the 2017 Rose d'Or Award for Entertainment, and has hosted his own BBC Radio 2 show The Art of Song. He topped the UK Singles Chart in January 2007 with " Grace Kelly" and has since gone on to record four more platinum-selling studio albums (most recently My Name is Michael Holbrook released in October 2019), as well as serve as judge/mentor on both the French version of The Voice and the Italian version of X Factor. Mika released his first full-length studio album, Life in Cartoon Motion, on Island Records in 2007, which has sold more than 8.3 million copies worldwide and helped Mika win a Brit Award-Best British Breakthrough act-and receive a Grammy Award nomination. ![]() (born 18 August 1983), known professionally as Mika ( / ˈ m iː k ə/ MEE-kə, stylised in all caps), is a singer-songwriter born in Beirut, Lebanon, and raised in Paris and London.Īfter recording his first extended play, Dodgy Holiday, Mika was predicted to be the number-one breakthrough act of 2007 in an annual BBC poll of music critics, Sound of 2007. ![]()
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