Berta Celeste Homem de Melo
Brazilian writer and poet (1902-1999)
Berta Celeste Homem de Melo (March 21, 1902 – August 16, 1999) was a Brazilian pharmacist, writer and poet. Known for writing the Portuguese language lyrics for the birthday song Parabéns a Você.
Early life
Berta was born on March 21, 1902, in Pindamonhangaba, São Paulo, Brazil. She was the only child of farming couple José Joaquim and Maria da Conceição Varela Homem de Melo. She married her cousin, Lorival Homem de Melo, and had a daughter, Lorice.
She graduated as a pharmacist and lent her name to a local pharmacy, but she did not work there. Instead she led the life of a housewife, listening to the radio and writing poems in her spare time. She would often enter radio competitions, creating rhymes for various products, winning cash and merchandise, including for floor wax, toothpaste, medicine, and tea.
Parabéns a Você
In 1942 the singer Almirante (Henrique Foréis Domingues), a Rádio Tupi presenter in Rio de Janeiro, launched a competition to select Portuguese lyrics to the melody of "Happy Birthday to You". Berta entered this contest using the pseudonym of 'Léa Guimarães', and her rhyme was selected as the winner from 5000 entries.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Berta Celeste Homem de Melo” is brazilian writer and poet (1902-1999). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Berta, Celeste and Homem, not as a finished interpretation.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q9655620. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1902, 1999 and 1942.
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This entry incorporates text from “Berta Celeste Homem de Melo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.