Dalida

In the course of a career lasting just over 30 years, Dalida earned 45 gold record awards and a pair of platinum records for her sales in Europe, the Middle East, and Japan. A superstar in France and much of the rest of Europe, Dalida enjoyed hit records in three different decades, despite an increasingly troubled personal life after the early '60s.

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