Before finding her footing in showbiz, veteran Hong Kong star Maria Cordero was doing physically exhausting work.
According to media reports, the 72-year-old, also known by her nickname Fat Mama, recently opened up about a difficult period in her life which lasted nearly three years.
At the time, she was married to a widowed Filipino pianist 22 years her senior. She was 18. When he lost his job, she was left to fend for their six children.
Four of them were schooling while the remaining two were still babies, so she decided to take on work in a moving company close to where she lived.
Her job involved carrying three sacks of flour at a time, totalling over 60kg. The flour would then need to be fed into a machine. After which, she would have to sift, mix and repack it.
“I had no choice. If I couldn’t carry it, your six children wouldn’t have anything to eat,” she said.
This was only one part of her arduous schedule; before work, she would make breakfast for her kids and iron their school uniforms.
Her lunch breaks were spent rushing home to prepare milk and food for them before returning to work.
After work, she would go home. Not to rest, but cook, do the laundry and check on her children’s homework.
All these took a physical toll and Maria recalled the skin on her hands being cracked.
“Washing clothes hurt so much that I’d cry out in pain. After finishing the laundry, I’d apply some Vaseline and put plastic bags over my hands before going to sleep. Then, I’d wake up the next morning and head straight back to work,” she said.
Born in Macau, Maria experienced a tumultuous childhood.
Her father died when she was nine, and she left school when she was 11 years old to work odd jobs including cooking, sales and factory inspecting to keep the family afloat.
She married her first husband when she was reportedly in her late teens, whom she would later divorce in 1989 due to domestic violence and infidelity.
Her showbiz career started by chance.
According to the South China Morning Post, it started around the time when Maria was a booking agent who scouted for talent across nightclubs and connected them with restaurants.
She brought a pianist to the club and randomly began singing with him out of boredom, she told a Hong Kong magazine in 2009.
In 1986, she became a regular singer at Canton Disco, a legendary nightclub in Hong Kong from the mid-1980s to the early ’90s where she got the attention of industry figures.
She became a recording artist, releasing hit songs such as Pursuit of Happiness and Light of Friendship in 1987.
Maria also acted in several films and dramas before transitioning to TV hosting — which she is now known for — in the late 1990s.
She married Portuguese engineer Rick de Silva in 1999, whom she stayed with until his death in 2020.
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