Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha, 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. Miranda was born in 1909 in Várzea da Ovelha e Aliviada, a village in the northern Portuguese municipality of Marco de Canaveses.
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. In 1933, Miranda signed a two-year contract with Rádio Mayrink Veiga, the most popular Brazilian station of the 1930s, and was the first contract singer in Brazilian radio history; for a year, in 1937, she moved to Rádio Tupi. She later signed a contract with Odeon Records, making her the highest-paid radio singer in Brazil at the time. 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 1941, she was the first Latin American star to be invited to leave her handprints 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. 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 popularised Brazilian music and increased public awareness of Latin culture. Miranda is considered the precursor of Brazil’s 1960s Tropicalismo cultural movement. A museum was built in Rio de Janeiro in her honour and she was the subject of the documentary Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business (1995).
