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Although she never found a big audience in the English-speaking world, Dalida was an unparalleled sensation in Europe and the Middle East before her tragic death at age 54. Dalida was born Yolanda Christina Gigliotti to middle-class parents of Italian origin in Cairo, Egypt on January 17, 1933. In 1954, she entered the Miss Egypt pageant, and was awarded first prize. She moved to Paris in hopes of a career in film, but when this didn’t pan out she turned to music and was discovered singing in a popular Parisian club and signed to the Barclay label. Dalida’s second Continued...

single, “Bambino,” became a huge hit in 1956. The following year, she was awarded a gold record for a million sales of the single in Europe. She followed up with such hit Dalida songs as "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), At the advent of rock and roll, Dalida was also able to make a successful transition to the new musical genre by changing her image with ease. By 1964, she'd sold an extraordinary 30 million records worldwide, though all of those sales were in the non-English speaking world, from the Middle East to Germany.
With her newfound fame and old-fashioned beauty and style, Dalida increasingly became the focus of the paparazzi and tabloid press and she was linked romantically to a succession of men. The singer's life took a sudden dark turn, when her then-current lover Luigi Tenco, a singer, killed himself at the 1967 San Remo Festival after failing to qualify for a spot on the program. Dalida, who found the body, made the first of several suicide attempts soon after. Her ex-husband Lucien Morisse took his own life sometime after her attempt at suicide in the wake of Tenco's death. In the midst of all this turmoil, she won the Oscar Mondial du Disque (World Oscar of Recording), a French award, to be sure, for her "Gigi L'Amoroso," beating out competitors that included Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night," But no amount of praise could save Dalida from herself. On May 3, 1987, Dalida was found dead of an overdose of barbiturates.