Maria Rosario Pilar Martinez Molina Baeza born on January 15, 1951, she professionally known by her stage name Charo, is a Spanish American actress, singer, comedian, and flamenco guitarist. Charo began playing guitar at the age of 9 and trained under the famed Andrés Segovia. In 1966 she married bandleader Xavier Cugat and they moved to the United States. In the late 1960s and 1970s, she became a ubiquitous presence on American television, frequently appearing as a guest star on series such as Laugh-In, Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. She is known for her uninhibited and exuberant manner, vague age, ostensible lack of fluency in English, heavy Spanish accent, and the catch-phrase "cuchi-cuchi." As a musician, she has performed and recorded in various styles for five decades. She released a series of disco recordings in the 1970s with Salsoul Records, most notably Dance a Little Bit Closer (1977). In 1995 her flamenco album Guitar Passion (1994) won the Female Pop Album of the Year award at the Billboard International Latin Music Conference and was named best female Latin pop album by Billboard. In an interview Charo said, "Around the world I am known as a great musician. But in America I am known as the cuchi-cuchi girl. That’s okay because cuchi-cuchi has taken me all the way to the bank." Charo was born in the town of Murcia, Spain. Her birth date and year has been a matter of some dispute. Her Spanish passport gives her name as María del Rosario Mercedes Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza. Her father was reportedly a lawyer who fled to Casablanca during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, while her homemaker mother stayed behind in Murcia, raising their children. Charo has occasionally claimed that she was enrolled in a convent as a young child and remained there until she was 15, when a nun stated that she belonged in show business. In the most colorful version of this childhood, Charo's grandmother hired a music professor to give her weekly classical guitar lessons, and he became the first man to enter the convent. Most sources indicate that she studied classical and flamenco guitar in a school in Madrid founded by Andrés Segovia for underprivileged children. In a 2005 interview she reminisced: "The institution had great young teachers and students. Everything was a charity. Mr. Segovia, between concerts that's when he'd come, and if you'd been there a year and you weren't good, you'd go out and they would give your place to another young kid." The couple was the first to have their nuptials in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. She later claimed that her marriage to Cugat had been merely a business contract, a way for him to legally bring her over to the United States where he was based. She moved to West 257th Street in The Bronx, New York, with her mother and aunt and was regularly featured in shows with Cugat's orchestra in New York and Las Vegas, as well as in overseas engagements in Latin America and Europe. She claims he was confident in her eventual success from early on, and that she gave him a Rolls-Royce as a parting gift once she legally came of majority age.

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