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Dalida - Besame Mucho
From Album: "Dalida: Besame Mucho”
Dalida (17 January 1933 – 3 May 1987) was an Egyptian Italian singer born and raised in Egypt. She lived most of her adult life in France. She received 55 gold records and was the first singer to receive a diamond disc.
She was born Yolande Gigliotti, the daughter of Italian parents living in Cairo. The family lived a comfortably middle-class life until the outbreak of the Second World War; Egypt came into the war on the side of the Allies and her father, because of his Italian nationality, spent four years in an internment camp. Yolande Gigliotti attended a religious school and studied stenography, intending to lead a nondescript life as an office worker — by the time she was 17, however, she had blossomed into a beautiful young woman, and began entering talent and beauty competitions. In 1954, the same year that she won the title of Miss Egypt, she made her first screen appearance in an Egyptian production entitled Sigarah Wa Kas, directed by Niazi Mostafa. She began using the name "Dalila," owing to her resemblance to Hedy Lamarr in the costume epic Samson and Delilah, and this was later in France altered to Dalida.
She left Egypt in 1955 to pursue a screen career in Paris. Dalida was cast in the film Le Masque de Toutankhamen, directed by Marco de Gastyne, but much more important to her career was a short singing stint that she took on in Paris. She accepted an offer to sing in the intermission between acts at a club, La Villa d'Este, where she was spotted by Bruno Coquatrix, a producer at the Olympia Theater, the largest performing venue in the city, where figures such as Charles Aznavour and Edith Piaf had seen some of their greatest triumphs, and also by radio producer Lucien Morisse. The two took her under their wing, Coquatrix introducing her to the French public, while Morisse later married her. Record producer Eddie Barclay, a former jazz pianist, signed Dalida to a contract with his own Barclay label, and her second single, "Bambino" — which was also later a hit for the Springfields — became a huge hit in 1956. The following year, she was awarded a gold record for a million sales of the single in Europe. Her later hits included "Gondolier" (1957), "Come Prima 'Tu Me Donnes'" (1958), "Les Gitans" (1958), "Ciao Ciao Bambina" (1959), "Les Enfants du Piree" (1960), and "La Danse de Zorba" (1965), the latter a vocal version of the dance from the movie Zorba the Greek. From 1960 onward, her brother, billed simply as Orlando, oversaw her recordings as producer, and could take some credit for securing her continued success in the 1960s and beyond.
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