Elli Medeiros
Biography
Elli Medeiros was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. Her mother, Mirtha Medeiros, decided to become an actress after Elli was born, and when she was admitted into Uruguays Escuela National, had to take her along, so Elli attended drama school and classes by Spanish teacher Pepe Struch before kindergarden. Mirtha graduated and quickly became a very busy actress and Elli was regularly hired each time a child was needed in a play or a TV show. Her first part, at age 4, was Mme Butterflys son, in the production of Puccinis opera at the Montevideo Opera. This was Orson Welles first role, at the same age. Ellis father, José Luis Medeiros, vanished from her life when she was five.
Elli attended the Uruguyan American School, and when her mother remarried and moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, she attended the Instituto Bayard, a British school. When she was fourteen, her mother and step father moved to Paris, and she had to learn French in a couple of months so she could attend high school. She tried several schools, including an art schoot, lEcole des Arts Appliquées, but dropped out before getting a "baccalauréat" to start her first band, the Stinky Toys, the first French punk band, playing several London punk Festivals along with the Clash and the Sex Pistols.
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Elli appeared on the cover of Melody Maker and that convinced the until then extremely reluctant French record companies to sign them a deal. After two albums, the Stinky Toys split and Elli and Stinky Toy Jacno then released several albums as the techno pop duo Elli and Jacno. Their last was Les nuits de la pleine lune (1984), the score to Eric Rohmers movie. Elli then went solo, her music becoming more personal, more Latin and had several hits in France, including Toi mon Toit, mega hit of 1986, now a standard.
After a break, Elli decided to go back to acting and school, and worked with Andreas Voutsinas, who was Lee Strasbergs assistant for twenty years and created the Paris "Actors Studio", le Théatre des Cinquante. She also took classes with Madeleine Barchevska and Bob Mc Andrew. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.