Tita Merello

There was a military band of the Patricios regiment of Buenos Aires, interminable speeches and recordings of her tangos at the funeral of Tita Merello. The crowd at Chacarita Cemetery was huge, as people left their Christmas gatherings and recession blues to say farewell to the city's darling of tango.

Born in a Buenos Aires tenement in the impoverished San Telmo district in 1904, Ana Laura Merello was the daughter of a coach driver who died when she was four months old and a mother who took in ironing. She climbed out of the gutter to become a combination of Bardot, Dietrich and Garbo of the tango, the music of the slums. "Tita" Merello described herself as "La Negra", because of her jet black hair, and also as "The Tough Doll" ("Muñeca Brava"). She made the toughness of the city streets her trademark, a symbol of her singing and acting.

Life for Merello was lived as a tango from the beginning. She managed to meet and overcome all the misfortunes of her life. She contracted tuberculosis when she was five, was in an orphanage until the age of nine, then became kitchen assistant on a large ranch in exchange for food and bed. At the age of 12 she returned to her mother's room in the tenement. She was still illiterate and applied for a job as an extra in a Spanish zarzuela theatre in Buenos Aires. At 16 she got a job as a chorus girl, and shortly after, in the Bataclan theatre, she sang her first tango in a squeaky adolescent voice.

Although film was to make her well-known throughout the Spanish-speaking world, it was the deep gravelly voice she developed in her singing that made her famous. Her songs hinged on a low slang, with its origins in the brothels of Buenos Aires, and caught public imagination, even though some of her lyrics were frowned upon anywhere other than on stage. The tango titles such as "Yira, Yira" (meaning something like, "Whore, Whore"), and "Cambalache" (translatable as "Mess"), and "Dicen de mi" ("They say of me"), were made famous by her voice and thrusting style.

Merello's first film, at the age of 29, was Tango, Argentina's first "talkie", made by Luis Moglia Barth in 1933, which included the musician Francisco Canaro, the singer Hugo del Carril, and the actor Luis Sandrini, with whom Merello always said she was in love. She began an on-off relationship with Sandrini that lasted until 1952, when Sandrini met the actress Malvina Pastorino, and the idyll came to an end.

In her second film, Idolos de Radio ("Radio Idols" made in 1934 by Eduardo Morera), she was still a singer more than an actress. In fact, she was neither a great beauty nor had a great voice, but used lyrics and body language to achieve success and the devotion of her public. She became a far more professional actress in her third film, La Fuga ("The Escape", made in 1937 by Luis Saslavsky), and went on to star in another 31 movies, the last as late as 1985 (Las barras bravas – "The Hooligans" – made by Enrique Carreras).

Known as much for a catalogue of tart remarks as for her songs, she is quoted still as if her words were wisdom. "I fell so far I hit the ground with my head" and "I'm a chunk of Buenos Aires", for instance. She often remarked that her only real frustration was never having had a child. In the early Nineties she became ill and avoided the public eye, giving her last interview in November 2001. Her style was still unchanged. She said, "People don't have time for Christ, they want to touch God."

Andrew Graham-Yooll