Birth Name : Michael Peter Balzary
Date of Birth : October 16, 1962
Birth Place : Burwood, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia

Michael Peter Balzary is the bassist for the alternative rock/funk rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers, and is a regular session musician as well as an occasional actor. Flea combines natural technical proficiency in his bass playing with a high level of musicality, while possessing the ability to play at intense speeds and flow naturally and spontaneously in onstage jams. In combination with his colourful personality and stage performance, Flea's bass playing has led to him being widely considered as one of the greatest bass guitar players of all time.

Michael (as Flea was then still known) led a relatively conventional family lifestyle in Australia until his father Mick was posted to New York in March 1967 in accordance with his job as a customs officer, taking with him his wife Patricia, daughter Karen and the young Michael. After only four years in the US, Michael's mother Patricia met and fell in love with a jazz musician named Walter Urban Jr in 1971, resulting in the divorce of his parents. Michael was again uprooted, this time right across America, as his mother and soon to be stepfather moved with him and his sister to live in Los Angeles in 1972.

Michael developed an enthusiasm in playing music very early, firstly trying his hand at the drums. However, at the age of nine he took up playing the trumpet and soon proved to be a natural talent. He was so skilled with the instrument, that upon his family's settlement in LA he swiftly earned a place in the Los Angeles Junior Philharmonic Orchestra. Already so proficient at playing the trumpet, watching his stepfather jamming with his bebop jazz band had a profound effect on the eleven-year-old Balzary, and this fueled his new-found love for jazz and leading exponents of the genre, such as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Ornette Coleman. Concerning his singular love for the jazz genre at the time, Balzary confessed to VH1's Behind the Music that he originally had no interest in rock and roll, and his ambition was to become a jazz musician like his stepfather. He was still an avid trumpeteer and jazz fan when he started at Fairfax High School in September 1976, but this academic shift also brought about a fateful meeting that would change his life forever.

He has done some acting, having appeared in the movies The Big Lebowski, My Own Private Idaho, Suburbia, Son in Law, The Blue Iguana, The Chase (1994) (with RHCP bandmate Kiedis), Motorama, Back to the Future Part II and Back to the Future Part III as 'Needles', headlining in Liar's Poker (1999), and providing the voice of the feral boy Donnie in the animated television series The Wild Thornberrys, as well as a minor, yet memorable role (licking Johnny Depp) in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, among others.

Flea married Loesha Zeviar in 1986. Their daughter, Clara, was born in 1988. Flea and Loesha split up in 1990 and have joint custody of Clara but remain on friendly terms, with Loesha's name remaining tattoed on Flea's chest. He has also recently had a baby girl named Sunny Bebop Balzary with his new fiancee, Frankie Rayder.

In 2001 Flea founded his own music school in Los Angeles called the Silverlake Conservatory of Music, in the trendy L.A. district of Silverlake.