Early Life
Burns was born in Port Sunlight, Bebington, Wirral, to an English father and German mother. His mother Eva was Jewish and born in Heidelberg, Germany. She had fled to Vienna, Austria to escape the anti-Semitic laws of the Nazis. It was in Vienna that she met Burns' father, then a British soldier, at a soldiers' tea dance.
When talking about his late mother in an interview for television programme Psychic Therapy, he said "as far as parental skills go in the conventional, normal world, she certainly wasn't a mother, but she's the best human being that I've ever had the privilege of being in the company of, and I know that she had a special plan for me. She called me Star Baby and she knew that there was something special in me. Just an incredible German woman; tiny, five-foot-one, but she could move a fucking wardrobe, she could lift a wardrobe." Burns also told that for the first five years of his life, he and his mother spoke to one another in German. "I grew up until I was five speaking German and a bit of French. There was no English spoken in my house. My father spoke to my mother in French, she spoke to me in German."
Read more about this topic: Pete Burns
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Men and women are not born inconstant: they are made so by their early amorous experiences.”
—Andre Maurois (1885–1967)
“Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)