Elis Regina was born in
Porto Alegre, where she began her career as a singer at an early age on the children's radio show
Clube de Guri. In her early teens she signed a record contract and a couple years later traveled to Rio de Janeiro, where she recorded her first album. by
Edu Lobo and
Vinícius de Moraes, which made her the biggest selling Brazilian recording artist since
Carmen Miranda. Her second album,
Dois na Bossa with
Jair Rodrigues, set a national sales record and became the first Brazilian album to sell over one million copies. "Arrastão" increased her popularity because the festival was broadcast via TV and radio. The record represented the beginning of
música popular brasileira (Brazilian popular music) and contrasted with bossa nova. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, she helped popularize
tropicalismo with
Gal Costa,
Gilberto Gil, and
Caetano Veloso. In 1970 she had her first son with first husband Ronaldo Bôscoli. Later on she had two more children with musician Cesar Camargo Mariano. Regina was nicknamed "hurricane" and "little pepper". She moved to Rio shortly before the
1964 Brazilian coup d'état which established the subsequent
military dictatorship in Brazil. Although her popularity protected her from reprisal when she criticized the regime while on tour in Europe, she was threatened with imprisonment unless she sang the Brazilian national anthem at an event honoring the anniversary of the coup. In the 1970s she recorded the album
Elis and Tom in Los Angeles with
Antonio Carlos Jobim. In 1982 she was starting her third marriage when she died from a combination of alcohol and cocaine at the age of thirty-six. ==Death==