page_title: Tita Merello
section_title: Early years
hierarchical_section_title: Tita Merello / Biography / Early years
caption_attribution_description: Español: Tita Merello con su hermano y su madre, c. 1910
context_page_description: Tita Merello was a prominent Argentine film actress, tango dancer and singer of the Golden Age of Argentine Cinema. In her 6 decades in Argentine entertainment, at the time of her death, she had filmed over thirty movies, premiered twenty plays, had nine television appearances, completed three radio series and had had countless appearances in print media. She was one of the singers who emerged in the 1920s along with Azucena Maizani, Libertad Lamarque, Ada Falcón, and Rosita Quiroga, who created the female voices of tango. She was primarily remembered for the songs "Se dice de mí" and "La milonga y yo".
  She began her acting career in theater and may have made silent films. She debuted on the first sound movie produced in Argentina, ¡Tango!, with Libertad Lamarque in 1933. After making a series of films throughout the 1930s, she established herself as a dramatic actress in La fuga, directed by Luis Saslavsky. In the mid-1940s, she moved to Mexico, where she filmed Cinco rostros de mujer, which earned her an Ariel Award from the Mexican Academy of Film. She returned to Argentina and starred in Don Juan Tenorio and Filomena Marturano, which were subsequently taken to the theater.
context_section_description: Laura Ana Merello, known as "Tita" was born on 11 October 1904 in a tenement in the neighborhood of San Telmo, Buenos Aires to the coachman Santiago Merello and an ironer, Ana Gianelli. The house where she was born has been designated as a historical site. Her birth certificate did not show her mother's name, but when she was four, her mother's name was recorded with the mother's nationality of Uruguayan. She had a younger half-brother, Pascual Anselmi, who had a different father.
  Her father died of tuberculosis when she was less than a year old. Merello had a difficult childhood marked by poverty. She was sent to an orphan asylum at age five because her mother had to work. While still a child, she was taken to Montevideo, Uruguay, where she worked as a maid without pay. At age 9, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a farm near Magdalena, where she worked in exchange for room and board, milking cows, cutting yerba mate and grilling food for the workers. She said she knew hunger and fear firsthand, as she lived it every day of her childhood, never going to school or learning to read or write. As an adult, she said of her childhood that it was brief, "Poor childhood is shorter than that of the rich. It was sad, poor and ugly".
  At age 12, she returned to the tenement to live with her mother She went to work in a seedy club called Ba Ta Clán, where the chorus girls became known as bataclanas. The place had a reputation and women who worked there were thought to be employed somewhere between the "lunfardo" (the Argentine underworld) and a bordello. Around 1917, Merello began working as a showgirl in the Rosita Rodriguez Company at Teatro Avenida and debuted in a play called Las vírgenes de teres. She was booed off the stage and vowed never to sing again, but hunger forced her to look for work in the cafés along the Avenida de Mayo.
  She soon earned popularity with her interpretation of the tango "Titina". She met the editor of the newspaper, La Nacion, Eduardo Borrás when she was fifteen, who began helping her learn to read. He later introduced her to Simón Yrigoyen Iriondo, who took charge of ending her illiteracy. Around 1919, she was performing at the Teatro Porteño in the chorus line and was fined 20 pesos because she wasn't wearing nylons. Years later, in the 1930s, Morello commented how things had changed and women were being paid to go without them.
  Some sources have claimed that Merello filmed silent movies in this period; others claim that "a" movie happened a decade later in 1928; and some claim her first film was not until ¡Tango! in 1933. Some claim there were three films, Buenos Aires tenebroso (1918), a crime drama; La garra porteña; (1918), and Amor de primavera (1918–1919) both directed by Juan Glizé and Vicente Marracino. Multiple sources claim she made Buenos Aires tenebroso directed by Juan Glizé but the year varies from 1917 to 1928.
  Tragedy befell her again at the age of 16, when her mother succumbed to tuberculosis and she began wandering from house to house, family to friends and back again. She became a vedette and was known as "La Vedette Rea", but her repertoire and fiery temper gave her a reputation that was counter to other performers, like Sofía Bozán. Her interpretation often incorporated deliberate farce to express the complexities of life. and while she was not known for having a great voice, she gained admiration for the expressiveness of her interpretations, which was well suited for the drama of tango.
caption: Tita Merello in the center with her brother Pascual (left) and their mother, Ana (right)
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