Marília Mendonça, one of Brazil’s most popular contemporary singers, has been killed in a plane crash at the age of 26. Four other people – her uncle, her producer and two crew members – also died in the accident in a rural area in south-eastern Minas Gerais state. Mendonça, who had a two-year-old son, was set to perform at a concert on Friday evening in the city of Caratinga, 12km (seven miles) from the crash site.
An investigation has been launched to determine the cause of the crash.
A Latin Grammy winner in 2019, Mendonça started her career as a teenager, and became a national star in 2016 as one of the biggest names of Brazilian country music known as Sertanejo. She was known as the country’s “Queen of Suffering”. In 2020, she was the most listened to artist in Brazil on Spotify.
Last year, as concerts were cancelled because of the pandemic, she performed in a series of online shows. One of them set the record of the most-watched live stream in the world, with 3.3 million peak viewers on YouTube.
