Aracy Balabanian
Thursday, July 30, 2020Aracy Balabanian (born February 22, 1940) is a Brazilian actress.
Balabanian was born in Campo Grande, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. Her parents were Armenians Raphael and Esther Balabanyans. They emigrated from Ottoman Empire to Brazil, fleeing from the genocide promoted in that country by the Ottoman Turks.
At the age of fifteen, she moved to São Paulo with her parents and helped raise her seven younger brothers. She passed the entrance exam for Social Sciences and for the Escola de Arte Dramática, coming to abandon the studies of Sociology, another entrance exam that she had taken and had been accepted, to devote herself to the theater. She said that she lived in a time when it was considered ugly for a woman to do theater, since women were formerly educated to be housewives and obey their husbands.