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Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha (9 February 1909-5 August 1955), known professionally as Carmen Miranda was a Portuguese-born Brazilian singer, dancer, and actress.
Nicknamed The Brazilian Bombshell, she was known for her signature fruit hat outfit that she wore in her American films.
As a young woman, Miranda designed clothes and hats in a boutique before making her debut as a singer, recording with composer Josué de Barros in 1929. Miranda's 1930 recording of Taí (Pra Você Gostar de Mim), written by Joubert de Carvalho, catapulted her to stardom in Brazil as the foremost interpreter of samba.
During the 1930s, Miranda performed on Brazilian radio and appeared in five Brazilian chanchadas, films celebrating Brazilian music, dance and the country's carnival culture. Hello, Hello Brazil! and Hello, Hello, Carnival! embodied the spirit of these early Miranda films. The 1939 musical Banana da Terra, directed by Ruy Costa, gave the world her Baiana image, inspired by Afro-Brazilians from the north-eastern state of Bahia.
In 1939, Broadway producer Lee Shubert offered Miranda an eight-week contract to perform in The Streets of Paris after seeing her at Cassino da Urca in Rio de Janeiro. The following year she made her first Hollywood film, Down Argentine Way with Don Ameche and Betty Grable, and her exotic clothing and Brazilian Portuguese accent became her trademark. That year, she was voted the third-most-popular personality in the United States; she and her group, Bando da Lua, were invited to sing and dance for President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In 1943, Miranda starred in Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here, which featured musical numbers with the fruit hats that became her trademark. By 1945, she was the highest-paid woman in the United States.
Miranda made 14 Hollywood films between 1940 and 1953. Although she was hailed as a talented performer, her popularity waned by the end of World War II. Miranda came to resent the stereotypical Brazilian Bombshell image she had cultivated and attempted to free herself of it with limited success. She focused on nightclub appearances and became a fixture on television variety shows. Despite being stereotyped, Miranda's performances popularized Brazilian music and increased public awareness of Latin culture.
In 1941, she was the first Latin American star to be invited to leave her hand and footprints in the courtyard of Grauman's Chinese Theatre and was the first South American honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Miranda is considered the precursor of Brazil's 1960s Tropicalismo cultural movement. A museum was built in Rio de Janeiro in her honor and she was the subject of the documentary Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business (1995).
Miranda was born Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha in 1909 in Várzea da Ovelha e Aliviada, a village in the northern Portuguese municipality of Marco de Canaveses.
She was christened Carmen by her father because of his love for Bizet's Carmen. This passion for opera influenced his children, and Miranda's love for singing and dancing, at an early age. She was educated at the Convent of Saint Therese of Lisieux. Her father did not approve of Miranda's plans to enter show business; her mother supported her, despite being beaten when her father discovered that his daughter had auditioned for a radio show (she had sung at parties and festivals in Rio).
Miranda arrived in New York on 18 May 1939. She and the band had their first Broadway performance on 19 June 1939 in The Streets of Paris.
During the war years, Miranda starred in eight of her 14 films; although the studios called her the Brazilian Bombshell, the films blurred her Brazilian identity in favor of a Latin American image.
After World War II, Miranda's films at Fox were produced in black-and-white, indicative of Hollywood's diminishing interest in her and Latin Americans in general.
Miranda died on 5 August 1955. She is buried in São João Batista Cemetery in Rio de Janeiro.
In 1956, her belongings were donated by her husband and family to the Carmen Miranda Museum, which opened in Rio on 5 August 1976. For her contributions to the entertainment industry, Miranda has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at the south side of the 6262 block of Hollywood Boulevard.
More information: Medium
I am ready to faint!
As soon as I see Hollywood, I love it.
Carmen Miranda
