Do we like them?

Do we like Amália Rodrigues?

Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent on the evidence we could open, with one contested stretch: how cosy she got with Portugal's old regime.

Amália is the voice most people mean when they say fado, and she was the regime's favourite export for years. A 2020 excerpt from journalist Miguel Carvalho's book says the dictatorship courted her and sent her abroad, and that, to be fair, she did not play hard to get. That is why she was branded the “cantora do regime”.

The big stoush is what happened after the 25 April 1974 revolution. She was accused of collaborating with the secret police and of grovelling to the old regime, and she copped the label “Princesa da PIDE”. Carvalho writes that she was hit by attacks, slander and half-truths in the first months of freedom, and chose not to defend herself with the details she could have used.

The picture is muddier than either label. Carvalho's research, backed by the Gulbenkian Foundation and published in Visão in 2019, found that PIDE itself kept her under watch on suspicion of backing communists. It also cites an unpublished 1966 letter to Salazar that, per Carvalho, is full of patriotic pride and praise. In a 1989 recorded interview she said: “Quando convinha, eu era comunista, quando não convinha, eu era fascista.”

On the harm test, we found nothing: no words against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet in what we could open. The record is thin there, so that is an absence of evidence, not a clean bill. The only question is her closeness to a dictatorship, and the sources disagree about it, with some even insisting she was used by the regime rather than devoted to it.

The good stuff is the more interesting part. According to Carvalho, she paid for young communists to travel to Warsaw and contributed to the youth movement MUD Juvenil. He also says she passed money to political prisoners through her hairdresser, and that she did not refuse requests for help. Carvalho calls the idea that this was just hedging her bets “tremendamente injusto, ainda que aqui ou ali possa ter sido verdade”.

Nothing new has turned up on her lately, and nothing from our reading that changes the picture. Most of this comes from one researcher's work, so treat the generosity as well reported rather than court-tested. There is no court record against her in what we found.