Maria Barroso
Portuguese actress (1925-2015)
Maria de Jesus Simões Barroso Soares (2 May 1925 – 7 July 2015) was a Portuguese actress, teacher and political and social activist, having been one of the founders of the Socialist Party (PS), in Germany, in 1973. As the wife of the 17th President of Portugal, Mário Soares, she was the first-lady of the country between 1986 and 1996.
Family
Barroso was the daughter of military Alfredo José Barroso (Alvor, 15 April 1887 – Campo Grande, Lisbon, 14 January 1970) and Maria da Encarnação Simões, born in Coimbra, they married in Alvor in 1912. She's the paternal granddaughter of José Barroso de Sousa and his wife Maria de Jesus Barroso and the maternal granddaughter of Manuel dos Santos and his wife Maria da Rainha Santa.
She was the paternal aunt of Alfredo Barroso and the maternal aunt of Mário Barroso, Eduardo Barroso and Graça Barroso.
Biography
She came from a big family - she was the fifth of seven siblings - Maria de Jesus Barroso was there for the family's move, from Fuseta to Setúbal and, then, from Setúbal to Lisbon. Her father, an opposer to the dictatorship, was arrested in the Lisbon Penitentiary and was deported to the Azores, where he was jailed in the Angra do Heroísmo Fort. After her primary education, that she did in Setúbal and Lisbon, she attended the secondary schools of D. Filipa de Lencastre and Pedro Nunes.
In her adolescence she gained an interest for theater and the art of spoken poetry, what led her to attend the Course of Dramatic Art in the National Conservatory Theater School. She ended her studies in 1943.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Maria Barroso” is portuguese actress (1925-2015). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Maria, Barroso and Portuguese, 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 Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q75062. VIAF identifies the subject as 54957648. The Library of Congress control number is n96041850. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1925, 2015, 1973 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maria Barroso” 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.