By 1945 Carmen Miranda was the best-paid woman in America
The woman in the towering fruit hat was born in a Portuguese village, raised in Rio and started out making hats in a shop. Within six years of arriving on Broadway, Carmen Miranda had become the highest-paid woman in the United States, and she later resented the image that made her.
Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha was born on 9 February 1909 in a village in Marco de Canaveses, northern Portugal. Her father emigrated to Rio de Janeiro that year and opened a barber shop, and her mother followed in 1910 with the baby and her elder sister. Carmen never went back to Portugal, but kept Portuguese nationality all her life. Her father named her after Bizet's opera and passed on his love of music, yet he opposed a stage career; when her sister Olinda fell ill with tuberculosis, Carmen worked in a tie shop at 14 to help with the bills, then learned millinery and ran her own hat business.
She began recording with composer Josué de Barros in 1929, and a 1930 song by Joubert de Carvalho made her Brazil's leading samba singer. Through the 1930s she sang on radio and appeared in five chanchadas, musical films steeped in carnival culture. The 1939 film Banana da Terra created her Baiana look, drawn from Afro-Brazilian women of Bahia.
That same year Broadway producer Lee Shubert caught her act at the Cassino da Urca and signed her for The Streets of Paris. Her Hollywood debut, Down Argentine Way, followed in 1940, and she and her band Bando da Lua performed for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1941 she became the first Latin American star to leave hand and footprints at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here in 1943 fixed the fruit headdress in the public mind.
After the war her appeal faded. She made 14 Hollywood films between 1940 and 1953 but grew frustrated with the Brazilian Bombshell caricature and moved into nightclubs and television variety. Even so, her performances spread Brazilian music across America, and she is seen as a forerunner of Brazil's 1960s Tropicalismo movement. She died on 5 August 1955; Rio later built a museum in her honour.
Source: Carmen Miranda
