Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper joked they “did a good job” pretending to be in love for ‘A Star Is Born’, as people believed they were actually dating

But now, Gaga has said the relationship rumours that circled the pair - who performed an emotional rendition of ‘Shallow’ from the movie at the Oscars earlier this year - just prove they put on an excellent “performance”.

Addressing the rumours, she said: “Quite frankly, I think the press is very silly. I mean, we made a love story. For me, as a performer and as an actress, of course we wanted people to believe that we were in love. And we wanted people to feel that love at the Oscars. We wanted it to go right through the lens of that camera and to every television that it was being watched on. And we worked hard on it, we worked for days. We mapped the whole thing out - it was orchestrated as a performance. In truth, when we talked about it, we went, ‘Well, I guess we did a good job!’ ”

The ‘Bad Romance’ hitmaker is good friends with the 44-year-old actor - who also directed the movie - and has praised his parenting abilities to two-year-old daughter Lea De Seine, whom he has with Irina.

She added: “He’s a beautiful father.”

Gaga won the Oscar for Best Original Song for ‘Shallow’, and says she saw “a lot of pain” looking at the trophy, because she had to “relive” parts of her career whilst playing Ally.

Speaking to Oprah Winfrey for ELLE magazine, she said: “The character of Ally stayed with me for a long time. I had to relive a lot of my career doing that role. I don’t know how you feel when you’ve acted, but for me, I don’t view it as filming a movie. I film it as living the character, and it’s a moment in my life, so I relived it all again, and it took a long time for it to go away.

“When I won the Oscar for ‘Shallow’, I looked at it, and a reporter asked me, ‘When you look at that Oscar, what do you see?’ And I said, ‘I see a lot of pain’. And I wasn’t lying in that moment.

“I was raped when I was 19 years-old, repeatedly. I have been traumatised in a variety of ways by my career over the years from many different things, but I survived, and I’ve kept going. And when I looked at that Oscar, I saw pain. I don’t know that anyone understood it when I said it in the room, but I understood it.”