“In a few months, I went from being a maid’s vacuum cleaner to a singer’s microphone.” This is how the singer Linda de Souza described her rise to the stage after an illegal arrival in France.
The artist was born on February 22, 1948 in Beringel, the village of Alentejo, into a poor family. Her real name is Theolinda Joaquina de Souza Lance. She was one of eight children, and when she was only five years old, her mother took her to a school run by nuns.
According to a French newspaper Le FigaroLinda started working at the age of 11 to help her family. In 1972, at the age of 24, he entered France illegally with his four-year-old son.
He learned to speak French through the magazine’s photo novels. nous two and in her early days in France, she worked as a maid and waitress. She began to sing in restaurants and quickly gained popularity, she was hired to perform at weddings and in bars.
He then signed his first recording contract and made his first television appearance on the French program Les Rendez-vous du dimanche. “Linda de Souza is the first singer to reach out to the foreign community by adapting her French hits to their language,” Melody TV’s program director and French song specialist Jean-Pierre Pasqualini stressed at the time.
In 1983, his name appeared in red letters in front of the Olympia, the oldest concert hall in Paris. Linda de Souza has been hailed as “the idol of the maids”.
The artist was, according to the description Le Figaro, a figure close to Mario Soares, the former president of Portugal. Therefore, she was often invited to dinners and events at the Élysée Palace, the official residence of the President of France. French Prime Minister from 1986 to 1988, Jacques Chirac even called Linda “his little princess.” Then the artist was forced to deny that she had an affair with a politician.
Linda de Souza’s career then went into decline due to a change in her team and the failure of a musical comedy taken from her autobiography.
The decade from 1990 to 2000 was a difficult one for the artist, who even appeared again on French television between 2013 and 2015. She also participated in the “Age Tendre” tour between 2015 and 2017, which featured successful singers from the 1980s.
According to BMFTV, the artist claimed to have been the victim of several fraudulent activities such as identity theft and administrative errors. “Everything was stolen from me,” Linda de Souza even said.
Author: Joana Duarte
Source: CM Jornal
I’m Sandra Hansen, a news website Author and Reporter for 24 News Reporters. I have over 7 years of experience in the journalism field, with an extensive background in politics and political science. My passion is to tell stories that are important to people around the globe and to engage readers with compelling content.