Eva Peron, second wife of President Juan Domingo Perón, was born on this date in 1919. 10 things you might not know about Evita:
Her full name was María Eva Duarte de Perón.
Her father was Juan Duarte, a wealthy farmer, her mother was his mistress. Eva and her four siblings were illegitimate and lived in poverty after Duarte abandoned them and went back to his wife. He died when Eva was six. Her family was not allowed to attend the funeral.
She left home at about 15 to seek fame and fortune as an actress in Buenos Aires. Historians agree that she didn’t, as the musical Evita suggests, run away with Tango singer Augustín Magaldi. She soon became successful and had a radio show on Radio Belgrano.
She met her future husband, Juan Perón, then a military colonel and head of Argentina’s Ministry of Labour, when he organised a fundraiser for victims of an earthquake in January 1944. As an actress and radio host, she was invited to the gala. She was in her mid-twenties, and he was in his late forties. They married in 1945.
She was more than just a trophy wife. She was involved in politics as well, campaigning with her husband and unofficially running the Ministries of Health and Labour. At the time, women didn’t even have the vote in Argentina, and Eva campaigned for women’s suffrage, which was made law in 1947. She founded the Female Perónist Party, a political party comprised of female voters.
She did a lot of work for charity and visited many hospitals and orphanages. In July 1948, Eva established the María Eva Duarte Social Help Foundation (later renamed the Eva Perón Foundation) to fight poverty in Argentina. The foundation gave cookware, and clothing to needy Argentinians, and funded the building of hospitals, schools, and housing for homeless women and children.
She was planning to run for vice president in 1951, which was welcomed by working class Argentinians but not by the military elite did not. Their opposition, along with the advanced cancer she was suffering from, caused her to withdraw from the race.
Eva was diagnosed with cervical cancer after fainting in public. Various treatments were tried including a hysterectomy and chemotherapy – she was the first person in Argentina to have chemotherapy, but nothing worked. There are even suggestions she had a prefrontal lobotomy to control the pain in the later stages. It’s also been suggested that the lobotomy wasn’t for the cancer at all but ordered by her husband to control her behaviour. She died on July 26, 1952 at 33 years old.
There’s a working class suburb in the greater Buenos Aires area, Ciudad Evita (Evita City) whch was not only named for her, but built to resemble her profile when viewed from the air. Today Ciudad Evita is home to around 70,000 people.
She has been portrayed on stage and screen by several actresses, including Faye Dunaway, Julie Covington, Elaine Paige and Madonna.
The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.
Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.
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