Background
Carmen Miranda was born on 9 February 1909 in Marco de Canvezes, Portugal.
Carmen Miranda was born on 9 February 1909 in Marco de Canvezes, Portugal.
Attended the Convent of Saint Therese of Lisieux.
She made some films in Brazil, and in 1939 she was in the musical Streets of Paris on Broadway. She also did a show at the Waldorf-Astoria, the New York hotel most favored by Hollywood moguls.
Fox snapped her up, and she had her moment: singing “South American Way” in Down Argentine Way (40, Irving Cummings); “I-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi like you very much” in That Night in Rio (41, Cummings); A Weekend in Havana (41, Walter Lang); Springtime in the Rockies (42, Cummings); doing “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat” in The Gang’s All Here (43, Busby Berkeley).
That was her peak, but she was in Four Jills in a Jeep (44, William A. Seiter); Greenwich Village (44, Lang); Something for the Boys (44, Lewis Seiler); Doll Face (45, Seiler); If I'm Lucky (46, Seiler); Copacabana (47, Alfred E. Green); A Date with Judy (48, Richard Thorpe); Nancy Goes to Rio (50, Robert Z. Leonard); with Martin and Lewis in Scared Stiff (53, George Marshall).
It was a short career, and in her bizarre fusion of the lacquered look of Punch’s Judy with the fruity effulgence of her head she was hardly the most useful or coherent image of things "Latin.” Today, anyone doing “Carmen Miranda” might be attacked as a stereotype, barely protected by camp. But in the early forties, she was a cheerful purveyor of the American notion that things south of the border were hot and absurd. Probably 90 percent of Americans believed she was Spanish, whereas she was a Portuguese who had gone to Brazil as a child and become a star in Bio on radio, records, and in movies.