Kravitz was married to actress Lisa Bonet, who played Denise Huxtable on
The Cosby Show. They were married on November 17, 1987, when they took a vacation to Las Vegas. Lenny was 23 and Lisa was 19. On December 1, 1988, Lisa gave birth their only child, a daughter named Zoe Isabella. Kravitz and Bonet separated in 1991, and their divorce was official in 1993.
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Suggestion credit:
Annabelle - Eugene, OR
Kravitz writes and produces his own songs and plays most of the instruments himself. He does it for artistic reasons but there's a financial benefit as well: Kravitz gets a much bigger cut of his royalties compared with artists who use outside songwriters and producers.
Kravitz is of mixed race. His mother is Roxie Roker, who played Helen on the TV show The Jeffersons, a groundbreaking role as half of TV's first interracial couple. She's of Bahamian descent. His father is the Russian-Jewish NBC-TV news producer Sy Kravitz.
Lenny Kravitz isn't exactly a rock star name, so when he started recording, he went by Romeo Blue. He soon decided that using his real name was important so he could present his true self.
As a kid, he acted in commercials.
Lenny went to high school in the 90210 Zip Code, the school that inspired the show Beverly Hills, 90210. His classmates included Nicolas Cage, Gina Gershon and Slash.
Kravitz always had an interest in interior design and would often buy places, redo them, then by another and repeat the process (his house in Miami had '60s retro decor, complete with a white, fur-lined tunnel). In 2003, he started his own company, Kravitz Design, as an outlet for this passion. This way, he could work on designing other people's houses instead of constantly redoing his own.
Kravitz told Event magazine: "Even as a child, I would pay careful attention to the lights, to how things were positioned in the room."
For the sake of simplicity, he doesn't wear underwear.
In 2000, he was arrested when he fit the description of a bank robber. He would sometimes leave the house looking like a slob, and that was one of those days. The mishap inspired his tune "
Bank Robber Man."
He appeared on
The Simpsons episode "How I Spent My Strummer Vacation," where along with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Tom Petty, Elvis Costello and Brian Setzer, he operates a rock and roll fantasy camp.
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Suggestion credit:
Bertrand - Paris, France
During their time together at high school Nicolas Cage and Lenny Kravitz were both in a production of Oklahoma. Kravitz was the drummer in the orchestra and Cage the lead actor.
When Lenny Kravitz first approached record companies during the early part of his career they dismissed his music as it "wasn't black enough." He told
Variety magazine: "I just knew that I was singing and performing my truth. This was a time right after everybody in the music industry was telling me that I couldn't do this sort of thing. I would take my music around to the labels, and I would get the whole 'It's not black enough.'"
Kravitz added that he was offered deals if he would change his music, but he refused to compromise. "I never took the deal," he said. "I wanted to do my thing. I was living in my car. I had no money. I'm young and in my late teens and who wouldn't take the money, but there was just something inside of me that wouldn't let me do it."
During an appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden, Kravitz shared a story about skipping classes at Beverly Hills High School to work on his music.
"I did what I had to do to graduate," he admitted. "I was playing a lot of music at the time, and I had about five or six music classes as well. I was in every band, every choir, the marching band. In fact, my history teacher, who was so kind to me, let me not come to class and gave me a C - she would tell me, 'Get out of here. Go play your guitar.'"
Kravitz is a second cousin of television weather presenter Al Roker. Their grandfathers, Albert Roker Sr. and Sy Kravitz, were cousins.
He didn't get along with his authoritarian father and left home at 16, relying on friends for accommodation. He says the LGBTQ community helped him out a lot around this time and influenced his fashion.
"I wanted to be around the creatives, and most of the people I met were from that community," Kravitz told Esquire.
Kravitz was engaged to the actress Nicole Kidman sometime around 2003, but they kept their relationship secret. Kidman revealed the engagement when she did press for the 2017 HBO series Big Little Lies, which she starred in alongside Zoe Kravitz.
Kravitz and Lisa Bonet are both half Black, half Jewish. When they met, it was the first time either of them came across another person with this background.
