“In a few months, I went from a maid’s vacuum cleaner to a singer’s microphone.” This is how singer Linda de Souza described her rise to the stage after her illegal arrival in France.
The artist was born on February 22, 1948 in a poor family in Pringle, one of the villages of Alentejo. Teolinda Joaquina de Sousa Lance is her first name. 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 the French newspaper Le FigaroLinda started working at the age of 11 to help her family. In 1972, at the age of 24, he illegally arrived in France with his four-year-old son.
Learn to speak French thanks to the pictures of magazine novels nous deux In the early days in France, she worked as a maid and waitress. She began singing in restaurants and quickly gained popularity, and began contracting with weddings and bars.
He then signed his first record contract and made his television debut on the French show Les Rendez-vous du dimanche. “Linda de Souza is the first singer to address a foreign society, adapting her French songs to their language,” Jean-Pierre Pasqualini, program director and specialist in French song at “Melody TV” confirmed at the time.
In 1983 his name appeared in red letters in front of the Olympia, the oldest music venue in Paris. Linda De Souza has been recognized as a “maids idol”.
He was the artist, as he described it Le Figaro, who is a close figure to Mario Soares, the former President of Portugal. Therefore, she was often invited to dinners and events at the Elysee Palace, the official residence of the President of France. The French Prime Minister from 1986 to 1988, Jacques Chirac, even called Linda his “little princess”. The artist was later forced to deny her relationship with the politician.
Then Linda de Souza’s career went downhill, with a change of cast and the failure of a musical comedy based on her autobiography.
The decade from 1990 to 2000 was difficult for the artist, who reappeared on French television between 2013 and 2015. She was also part of the “Age Tendre” tour, between 2015 and 2017, which brought together successful singers from the 80s.
According to BMFTV, the artist claimed to be the victim of several scams, such as identity theft and administrative errors. Linda De Souza even said, “Everyone stole from me.”
