Carla Bruni-Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa(born Carla Gilberta Bruni Tedeschi  23 December 1967) is an Italian-born French naturalized singer and fashion model. In 2008, she married Nicolas Sarkozy, then president of France.

Bruni was born in Italy and moved to France at the age of seven. She was a model from 1987 to 1997 before taking up a career in music. She wrote several songs for Julien Clerc that were featured on his 2000 album, Si j’étais elle. Bruni released her first album, Quelqu’un m’a dit, in 2003, which eventually spent 34 weeks in the top 10 of the French Albums Chart. Bruni won the Victoire Award for Female Artist of the Year at the 2004 Victoires de la Musique. The same year, Bruni released her second album, No Promises, then the following year, she released her third album, Comme si de rien n’était. In 2013, Bruni released her fourth album, Little French Songs. In 2017, Bruni released her fifth album, French Touch. She has sold 5 million albums during her career.

In 2009, she created the Carla Bruni-Sarkozy Foundation for philanthropic efforts. Bruni was born in Turin, Italy. She is legally the daughter of Italian concert pianist Marisa Borini and industrialist and classical composer Alberto Bruni Tedeschi. In 2008, however, Bruni told Vanity Fair that her biological father is Maurizio Remmert, a classical guitarist who comes from a wealthy family. When Remmert met Marisa Borini at a concert in Turin, he was a 19-year-old classical guitarist, and their affair lasted six years. Her sister is actress and movie director Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. She had a brother, Virginio Bruni Tedeschi (1959 – 4 July 2006), who died from complications of HIV/AIDS. Her (legal) paternal grandparents and her maternal grandfather were Italian, while the last quarter of her ancestry is French. She is second cousin of Alessandra Martines.

Bruni is heiress to the fortune created by the Italian tire manufacturing company CEAT, founded in the 1920s by her legal grandfather, Virginio Bruni Tedeschi. The company was sold in the 1970s to Pirelli (the brand continues in its former subsidiary in India, founded in 1958). The family moved to France in 1975,[4] purportedly to escape the threat of kidnapping by the Red Brigades, a Communist terrorist group active in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s. Bruni grew up in France from the age of seven, and attended the boarding school Château Mont-Choisi in Lausanne, Switzerland. She went to Paris to study art and architecture, but left school at 19 to become a model. By her biological father, Bruni has a half-sister, Consuelo Remmert.

Bruni signed with City Models in 1987, aged 19. Paul Marciano, president and creative director of Guess? Inc., came across her picture among composite cards of aspiring models, and chose her to model with Estelle Lefébure in campaigns for Guess? jeans. Bruni subsequently worked for designers and fashion houses such as Christian Dior, Givenchy, Paco Rabanne, Sonia Rykiel, Christian Lacroix, Karl Lagerfeld, John Galliano, Yves Saint-Laurent, Shiatzy Chen, Chanel, and Versace. By the 1990s, Bruni was among the 20 highest-paid fashion models, earning US$7.5 million in her peak year. While modeling, Bruni dated Eric Clapton, then Mick Jagger. On 11 April 2008, a 1993 nude photograph of Bruni taken during her modelling career sold at auction for US$91,000 (€65,093) – more than 60 times the expected price. She was a modeling subject of a 1999 trompe-l’œil wool-knit dress body painting by Joanne Gair that is included in Gair’s second book, Body Painting: Masterpieces by Joanne Gair.

In 1997, Bruni quit the world of fashion to devote herself to music. She sent her lyrics to Julien Clerc in 1999, based on which he composed six tracks on his 2000 album Si j’étais elle. In 2003, her debut album Quelqu’un m’a dit, produced by Louis Bertignac and released in Europe, was a surprise hit, selling 2 million copies. Three songs from the album appear in Hans Canosa’s 2005 American film Conversations with Other Women, the song Le Plus Beau du quartier was used in H&M’s Christmas 2006 commercial, and the title track was featured in the 2003 movie Le Divorce and in the 2009 movie (500) Days of Summer. In January 2010, her song “L’amoureuse” was featured in an episode of NBC’s Chuck, “Chuck vs. First Class”.

In 2004, Carla Bruni won an EBBA Award. Every year the European Border Breakers Awards (EBBA) recognize the success of 10 emerging artists or groups who reached audiences outside their own countries with their first internationally released album. In 2005, she wrote the lyrics for 10 out of 12 songs for Louis Bertignac’s new album Longtemps, and performed two duets with him on the album, Les Frôleuses and Sans toi. In 2006, Bruni recorded “Those Little Things”, an English-language translation of the Serge Gainsbourg song “Ces petits riens” for the tribute album Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited. She took part in the opening ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics in a parade paying tribute to the Italian flag.

Her second album, No Promises containing poems by William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, Walter de la Mare, and Christina Rossetti, set to music, was released in January 2007. She continued recording after her marriage. She released her third album Comme si de rien n’était on 11 July 2008. The songs are self-penned except for one rendition of “You Belong to Me” and another song featuring Michel Houellebecq’s poem La Possibilité d’une île set to music. Royalties from the album will be donated to unidentified charitable and humanitarian causes.