Gisele Bundchen

Template:Infobox model Gisele Caroline Bündchen (/ɡiːˈzɛliː ˈkæroʊlaɪn ˈbʌndhən/; Template:IPA-pt, Template:IPA-de; born 20 July 1980) is a Brazilian model and actress.

Since 2004, Bündchen has been among the highest-paid models in the world, and as of 2007 was the 16th richest woman in the entertainment industry. In 2012, she placed first on the Forbes top-earning models list. In 2014, she was listed as the 89th Most Powerful Woman in the World by Forbes.

In the late 1990s, Bündchen was the first in a wave of Brazilian models to find international success. In 1999, Vogue noted "The Return of the Sexy Model", and she was credited with ending the "heroin chic" era of modeling. Bündchen was one of the Victoria's Secret Angels from 2000 until mid-2007. Bündchen pioneered the "horse walk", a stomping movement created when a model picks her knees up high and kicks her feet out in front. In a 2007 Vogue interview, Claudia Schiffer stated that Bündchen is the only remaining supermodel.

Bündchen ventured into acting when she played a supporting role in Taxi (2004), for which she was nominated at the Teen Choice Awards for Choice Movie Breakout Performance, and for Choice Movie Bad Guy. Bündchen had a supporting role in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), and from 2010 to 2011, she was the executive producer of an educational environmental cartoon, Gisele & the Green Team.

Bündchen married New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady in 2009. She supports many charities including Save the Children, Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, as well as dedicating time to environmental causes. She is the Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Environment Programme.

Family and early life

Bündchen is supposedly a sixth-generation Brazilian of German descent, born and raised in Horizontina or in Três de Maio, Rio Grande do Sul, Southern Brazil, to Vânia Nonnenmacher, a bank clerk pensioner, and Valdir Bündchen, a college professor and writer, both of German extraction.

The “sixth-generation” representation is based solely on Bundchen’s response in an interview and seems to contradict that Horizontina was not settled by a mixture of Germans, Italians, and Poles until 1927, whereas six generations would place that settlement circa 1850. That her parents speak German as their primary language also implies a more recent immigration from Germany, which, considering Bundchen’s birth in Horizontina in 1980, would imply an immigration from Germany with other Germans in the middle 20th century after the end of World War II. She grew up with five sisters—Raquel, Graziela, Gabriela, Rafaela and her fraternal twin, Patrícia, her junior by five minutes. In addition to Portuguese, Gisele speaks English, Italian, Spanish and some French, and learned German at school, but has stated that: "....being out of touch with the language for such a long time, I unfortunately forgot it."

In 1993, Bündchen joined a modeling course with her sisters Patrícia and Gabriela at their mother's insistence. The following year, Bündchen was discovered by the Elite modeling agency at a shopping mall in São Paulo while on a school excursion. She was subsequently selected for a national contest, Elite Look of the Year, in which she placed second. Bündchen placed fourth in the Elite Model Look world contest in Ibiza, Spain. At 14, Bündchen moved to São Paulo to launch her modeling career. In 1996, Bündchen had her first New York City break at Fashion Week.