Dirce Grandino de Oliveira (April 7, 1922 - June 18, 1999) known as Dircinha Batista was an actress and Brazilian singer.

Biographie

Dircinha Batista was a singer of great success. In more than forty year career, she recorded over three hundred discs at 78 rpm, with many big hits, especially carnival songs. She worked in sixteen Brazilian movies, was a child prodigy. Dircinha began performing at festivals at six years of age. She began to participate his father's shows in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo from 1928.

She and her sister Linda Batista became famous still young and soon won the admiration of the then president Getúlio Vargas which considered the sisters Batista "national heritage". She became RCA Victor's sales champions over the years 40, 50. In the 60s even at the height of his career Dircinha already struggled with depression and used to be hospitalized in clinics and sanatoriums.

At 13, Dircinha made the film Hello, Hello Brazil! directed by Wallace Downey and the following year in Hello, Hello, Carnival! produced by Adhemar Gonzaga, another great success at the time of chanchadas. The career of the singer "took off" after that Francisco Alves presented in his program on Radio Cajuti as "the girl who had a bird's throat." In 1948 was elected "Queen Radio's".

Surrounded by his mother and without ever having been married, Dircinha locked himself to the world in 1974, after the death of Dona Neném, thereafter she remained secluded in his apartment in Copacabana to Linda sister's care. In recent years, she found himself virtually isolated from the world, interned in the Centro Gerontológico Mercedes Miranda in Botafogo.

Died of heart failure on April 18, 1999 after 77 years in the Hospital São Lucas, his body was laid in the chapel of Cemitério São João Batista, where was held the funeral.