Carmen Miranda

Born in Portugal and raised in Rio, Miranda sang samba in a hat shop before she recorded it, and by the mid-1930s she was the most popular singer in Brazil, working with the composers who were inventing the modern form. Hollywood took her in 1939 and turned her into the Brazilian Bombshell, a costume of fruit and platform shoes repeated across a dozen films. By 1945 she was the highest-paid woman in the United States.

When she came home in 1940 and sang at a casino in Rio, the audience received her in silence: the Brazilian press had decided she had been Americanised, and the humiliation kept her away for fourteen years. Hollywood, for its part, would not let her play anything else, and the parts thinned as the studios lost interest in Latin America. She collapsed on a television set in 1955 after a series of exhausting years, went home to bed and died of a heart attack that night, at forty-six. Her body was flown to Rio; the government declared national mourning and half a million people followed the coffin. She lies in São João Batista at the foot of Corcovado.