Biography
Willeke Alberti started her career at the early age of eleven in the musical Duel om Barbara and she recorded her first single in 1958 together with her father. During the 1960s, she was a well-known singer in the Netherlands and had at least one #1 hit with "De winter was lang" ("It was a long winter"), however there was no official Dutch chart at the time. Willeke and her father had a television show between 1965 and 1969. Her singing career from 1970 onwards is less active, however Alberti still releases singles and albums at an irregular interval and plays minor roles in television programs and movies.
From 1964 to 1974 she was married to musician Joop Onk and they had a daughter. She married John de Mol in 1976, and they had a son, Johnny de Mol. The couple divorced in 1980, and Alberti married a third time, with football player Søren Lerby. Another son was born from that marriage. Søren Lerby and Willeke Alberti separated in 1990.
In 1994 she represented the Netherlands in the Eurovision Song Contest with the song "Waar is de zon?" ("Where is the sun?"), which claimed a meagre four points from the international juries, all coming from Austria. The Netherlands beat only Estonia and Lithuania that evening.
Through the years Alberti has become embraced in the Netherlands as a gay icon, due to a combination of her song repertoire, her durability and her performances in support of many gay causes.
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“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—James Boswell (1740–95)