Personal
Tucker was born Sonya Kalish (Russian Соня Калиш) to a Jewish family in Tulchyn, Ukraine. Her family emigrated to the United States when she was an infant, and settled in Hartford, Connecticut. The family changed its name to Abuza, and her parents opened a restaurant.
She started singing for tips in her family's restaurant. In 1903, at the age of 17, she was briefly married to Louis Tuck, from which she decided to change her name to Tucker. She bore a son with Tuck, named Bert. (She would marry twice more in her life, but neither marriage lasted more than five years.)
She continued performing in the U.S. and the United Kingdom until shortly before her death from lung cancer in 1966, at the age of 80. She was interred at Emanuel Cemetery in Wethersfield, Connecticut.
Read more about this topic: Sophie Tucker
Famous quotes containing the word personal:
“A man who has nothing which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the existing of better men than himself.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
“Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt—for “woman.””
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“In contrast with envy, which usually occurs between two people and is focused upon another person’s qualities or possessions, jealousy occurs when a third person becomes a threat to a dyad. Jealousy involves the loss or the impending loss of a relationship that one wants to hold onto, a relationship that is vital to personal fulfillment and claimed as one’s own.”
—Carol S. Becker (b. 1942)