A three-year-old Elvis from Honolulu

Bruno Mars began as a child impersonator. Born Peter Gene Hernandez in Honolulu in 1985 and raised in Waikīkī, he grew up in a family where his mother was a hula dancer and singer and his father a percussionist. His uncle, an Elvis impersonator, encouraged the three-year-old to perform songs by Presley and Michael Jackson. His father gave him the nickname “Bruno” at two, because he thought the boy resembled the wrestler Bruno Sammartino.

In 2003 he moved to Los Angeles to chase a musical career, and for a while he was better known behind the scenes. He co-founded the production team the Smeezingtons and rose to fame as a recording artist after singing the hook on B.o.B's number one “Nothin' on You”. His first three albums, Doo-Wops & Hooligans, Unorthodox Jukebox and 24K Magic, found critical and commercial success, and the last won the Grammy for Album of the Year.

The hits kept coming: “Just the Way You Are”, “Grenade”, “Locked Out of Heaven”, “When I Was Your Man” and “That's What I Like”. His 2014 collaboration with Mark Ronson, “Uptown Funk”, became Billboard's best-performing song of the 2010s. In 2021 he teamed up with Anderson .Paak as Silk Sonic, whose “Leave the Door Open” reached number one. In 2024 he had two more chart-topping duets, “Die with a Smile” with Lady Gaga and “APT.” with Rosé.

His first solo album in ten years, The Romantic, arrived in 2026, led by “I Just Might”, his tenth US number one. He has sold over 150 million records, collected 16 Grammy Awards, and is the only artist to pass 150 million monthly listeners on Spotify. All of it came from a showman with a three-octave tenor, backed by his band the Hooligans. The boy who copied Elvis grew up to make the copying look like a craft.