Journalist broke barriers in Brazilian television

RIO DE JANEIRO — Glória Maria, considered Brazil’s first Black television journalist, who toppled barriers for Black women in television at a time when the country’s anchor chairs were mostly filled by white men, died in Rio de Janeiro on Feb. 2. She was 73.

Globo, her longtime employer, said in an announcement that the cause was a cancer that she had seemingly beaten in 2019, but that returned last year and had spread to her brain.

Glória Maria spent more than five decades in front of the camera at Globo TV, Brazil’s largest television network, becoming a Black idol in a country with a history of deep racial prejudice.

Starting as a local reporter in Rio, she went on to work as a correspondent and anchor. She reported from more than 100 countries, covering the 1982 Falklands War, the 1996 Japanese embassy hostage crisis in Peru, two World Cups and two Olympics.

“I was very poor,” she told a Brazilian television program in 2019. “I didn’t have money to see the world. I started traveling with Globo TV, and then I made the world my playground.”

Known for her ability to pose difficult questions with flair, she interviewed countless celebrities on camera, including Michael Jackson, Elton John, Nicole Kidman and Madonna, whom she interviewed in English, relaying the answers back in Portuguese for her Brazilian audience.

“She had this absurd charisma,” fashion journalist Bruno Astuto, a longtime friend, said in an interview. “There wasn’t a person who didn’t like her.”

But what catapulted Glória Maria to stardom were the adventurous segments, taking her to far-flung corners of the globe, in which she pulled off daring stunts as the cameras rolled, bringing a new kind of participatory reportage to Brazil.

She bungee jumped from the world’s highest point in Macau, trekked in the Himalayas and smoked marijuana before riding a roller coaster while visiting a Rastafarian community in Jamaica.

She nonetheless frequently reminded her admirers that she wasn’t particularly brave, and that she needed to push herself beyond her fear.

“I am a person who is driven by curiosity and fear,” she said in a 2018 interview. “If I stop to think rationally, I do nothing. I have to let go of rationality to go forward, let curiosity and fear take over, and then I’ll do anything.”

Unpretentious in both manner and speech, Glória Maria was especially adored by Brazilians who, like her, came from poverty.

“People identified with her, they felt represented by her,” said Pedro Bial, who co-anchored the newsmagazine “Fantastico” with her for a decade. “It gave viewers — the poorest Brazilians, those most deprived of opportunities — the experience of living what Glória Maria was living on television.”

Her ubiquitous presence on television was also deeply symbolic in a country where Black people are disproportionately affected by poverty, violence and lack of opportunity, despite making up the majority of the population.

“Here is this Black woman, riding a roller coaster, having fun,” said Flávia Oliveira, a Brazilian television presenter. “She showed us that the Black body is also entitled to leisure. It’s not only about pain, about racism, about wounds, about problems.”

Still, Glória Maria was often the victim of racism. In the 1970s, she famously filed a police complaint when a manager barred her from a luxury hotel. Decades later, when she was cohosting “Fantastico,” the first program of its kind in Brazil, viewers would call in demanding that she be replaced with a white presenter.

“Being the first is beautiful, it’s powerful,” Astuto said. “But she walked a really lonely road.”

Glória Maria Matta da Silva was born in the Vila Isabel neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, on Aug. 15, 1949. Her father, Cosme Braga da Silva, was a tailor, and her mother, Edna Alves Matta, was a homemaker.

She studied journalism at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro while working as a switchboard operator. She began her career in 1970 with an unpaid internship at Globo, monitoring police scanners for news.

Using Glória Maria as her professional name, she made her on-screen debut in 1971, reporting on the collapse of a stretch of viaduct that killed 48 people. In 1977 she became the first journalist in Brazil to appear on a live color transmission. It was a rough start: A technical glitch knocked out the lighting, and when she went on the air she was kneeling, lit by the headlights of a news truck.

She married Eric Auguin in the 1980s, but the two never lived together and divorced after eight years, she said in an interview. And in another interview, in 2021, she said that she often had multiple lovers.

She claimed for many years that she didn’t want to start a family and preferred to dedicate herself to her career. But in 2009, she adopted two orphaned sisters she had met while volunteering at a children’s shelter.

“I had never thought about having children until I saw them for the first time and I was sure they were my daughters,” she told a television program in 2012.

Her daughters, Maria Matta da Silva and Laura Matta da Silva, survive her.

Toward the end of her life, as cancer weakened her body, Glória Maria sank into a depression, Bial, her former co-anchor, said. But, he added, she never lost hope, often assuring friends that she would improve.

“She still had a hunger to live, she didn’t want to accept the end,” he said. “She left us, but with so much revolt.”