"Lovely Lena", as she is now almost universally nicknamed, was discovered on a television casting show late last year. Millions of television viewers followed her progress in Oslo together with tens of thousands of Germans who watched the contest broadcast on video screens in town squares and at other outdoor venues. The Bild am Sonntag newspaper caught the prevailing mood with a front-page headline which seemed to allude to the Euro crisis. "Europe likes us after all!" the paper proclaimed after Lena won by dint of 76 points supplied by viewers in European countries outside Germany.
Her win is the first Eurovision victory for Germany in 28 years. Back in 1982, the contest was won by the pious-looking "Nicole" with her song "Ein bisschen Frieden" ("A Little Peace"), which came out at the height of the then-West German peace movement's protests against the deployment of US cruise missiles in Germany. In a statement, Chancellor Angela Merkel congratulated Germany's latest pop heroine on her "super success" in Oslo. "With her naturalness and warmth, she is a wonderful example of young Germany," Ms Merkel added.
Yet it had been a different story back in May when Meyer-Landrut came under fire for what some in the media called "nude pictures" of her. In fact, the singer, who says she always wanted to be an actress, appeared in a docu-drama sitting in a pool with a young man and viewers get a glimpse of her chest. Interviewed about it, Meyer-Landrut simply told German reporters that it was just a role she played. "I was acting and that means it was not my privacy. Give me one reason why I should be upset about this. In our family we have always said: today's newspaper is used to wrap the fish in tomorrow."
The footage has been repeatedly shown on German TV by RTL, and her 19 year old co-star Nicolas remembers filming the scene that wowed his jealous classmates: “Lena came to me with open arms and said, ‘come on, we’ll just simply do it!’” And then the pair jumped naked into the pool for the programme ‘Helfen sie mir’, sharing a passionate kiss. “Lena has very soft lips and was really working flat out," smiles Nicholas. "We tried to be as professional as possible.” For half a night, between midnight and 6am, the young actor kissed the hot star. “We shot the kissing scene three times, during which we were completely naked,” Nicolas said. “We did not know each other before the shoot, but we got along well. Lena and I were both single, as far as I know. We wanted to exchange numbers at the airport, but it didn’t work out.”
What little the Germans knew about Meyer-Landrut until recently can be summed up in a few sentences. Her grandfather was the head of the Office of the Federal President under Richard von Weizsäcker, who was the president of Germany between 1984 to 1994, as well as the German ambassador to Moscow. Little is known about her parents: She mentions her mother often but never her father. She is an only child and she is far-sighted. She doesn't play any musical instruments and she cannot read music. The subjects in which she will sit exams are biology, history and sports. She has a tattoo on her left, inner arm, and she is smaller in real life than she appears on television. She's an average German girl, apparently. And when reporters ask her friends about her, the answer is often: "She's a bit of a nutter."
There are another couple of suppositions one could add. One might imagine that the mother of a teenage girl who was about to graduate from high school would not be completely overjoyed when her only child came to her, out of the blue, and told her, shortly before final school leaving exams, that she was going to be a contestant on a major international television show. "And I really want to do it." The fact that Meyer-Landrut didn't even tell her friends that she had entered the contest is also interesting. She says it is because she wanted to avoid silly comments. But it also indicates that she is someone who was self-aware enough to make a decision like this without consulting anyone else.
A not inconsiderable part of Meyer-Landrut's charm also comes from the fact that she prefers not to answer questions about her private life. "It's about the music," she replies in these instances. "I am sitting here because I won the show, 'Our Star For Oslo.' And members of my family have nothing to do with that. Anyway, my life is totally boring."
Meyer-Landrut is a funny sort of a star. She took ballet lessons as a child but when she dances on stage she looks more like rock musician Joe Cocker than a ballerina. Her voice makes an impression but it seems uncontrolled. One of the many "Lena moments" during the program in which she competed to go to Oslo came when the host asked her about her breathing technique while singing. Her succinct answer: "I don't have one."
"You can't make a star like Lena, you have to find them," says Frank Briegmann, the head of Universal Music in Germany, one of the most powerful executives in the country's music industry. "You can outline specifications, in that you can say, we want artists who are authentic, who have their own ideas, who don't fit into a (tight) corset. So you communicate that and you hope that these kinds of artists turn up. And after that you take care of them."
And along came Meyer-Landrut -- with her homemade English accent (she has never been to England), her turns of phrase, now known among fans as Lena-isms, with the enthusiasm with which she sang and with all these funny little quirks that saw her chattering her way into her audience's heart. "This definitely was not to be expected," she declared after winning the contest. "I am just shattered. I just can't believe it," she added. "Do I really have to sing it again?" she asked as the German flag was thrust into her hand on stage in Oslo as her victory was announced.
Television Series: Helfen sie Mir
Actress: Lena Meyer-Landrut
Video Clip Credit: Red-Devil
http://rapidshare.com/files/383187109/Lena_Meyer_-_Landrut_NACKT_____bei_Bitte_helfen_Sie_mir__RTL_Exclusiv__HQ.avi
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