Name	Charo
Height
Naionality	Spain
Date of Birth	January 15, 1951
Place of Birth	Murcia, Spain
Famous for

Charo was born María del Rosario Pilar Martínez Molina Baeza in Murcia, Spain, Charo is the daughter of a lawyer, who reportedly fled to Casablanca during Francisco Franco's dictatorship while her homemaker mother stayed behind in Murcia raising their children. She studied classical and flamenco guitar while residing in Murcia, and can claim Andrés Segovia as her guitar teacher. (Segovia taught general music classes as community service in schools around Murcia.) She took guitar lessons from him and other teachers from the age of nine on. As a result of her training and skill she has been named "Best Flamenco Guitarist" in Guitar Player Magazine's readers' poll twice. One of Charo's regrets is that because of her flamboyant stage presence, she has been overlooked as a serious guitar player.

When Charo was quite young, she was "discovered" by famous bandleader Xavier Cugat, whom she later wed on August 7, 1966. Cugat was 66 and had married four times before then, though contemporary reports sometimes listed fewer marriages; an April 1966 column by Earl Wilson on the couple's wedding plans announced, "Sixty-year-old Xavier Cugat and his 20-year-old Spanish girl friend and singing star Charo hope to get married in San Cugat, Spain, in a few days – if Cugat can convince church authorities his two divorces should not be counted against him since he wasn't married in church."[2] The couple were the first to have their nuptials in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Some fan magazines say that she learned English from Buddy Hackett.

In a February 2005 interview with the Los Angeles-based Spanish-language newspaper La Opinión, Charo claimed that her marriage to Cugat had been merely a "business contract," a way for him to legally bring her over to the United States, where he was based.[9] She moved to 257th Street in the Bronx, New York City along with her mother and aunt, and was regularly featured in shows with Cugat's orchestra in New York and Las Vegas, as well as in overseas engagements in Latin America and Europe. She claims he was confident in her eventual success from early on, and that she gave him a Rolls-Royce as a parting gift once she came of legal age.