Behind the famous actress hides a famous singer. Few people know it, but the 53-year-old actress, currently starring in the series The man of our lives, is the sister of the singer of Banana split, Lio. As a reminder, the two women are half-sisters, even if Helena Noguerra, who has just become a grandmother, refuses to use this term, judging their bond of brotherhood full and complete. She had indeed entrusted it to the Sunday newspaper in 2014: “We could start screaming and scratching when we read ‘half-sisters’, because we have the impression that we are trying to separate us.”
The two women are extremely close and were raised together. Indeed, the mother of Lio and Helena Noguerra, who is called Lena, fled Portugal, where the singer Lio was born, with her lover to go and settle in Belgium in 1968. The interpreter of L es Browns don’t count for plums ended up living with his mother, having been kidnapped by his father when he was 3 years old, a year before his youngest daughter Helena was born a year later. The two women therefore grew up together and Lio has always had a major place in the life of his half-sister.
Lio at Gala.
A protective role that the youngest will have much later in the life of Lio. Indeed, in an interview with Gala on March 24, 2022, the 59-year-old singer revealed that she had been able to count on the infallible support of her little sister to flee her violent companion. “She saw things she didn’t understand, so she talked about it around her and approached an association for battered women,” explained the singer. “He was told that the first thing I would do would be to deny, to minimize, to take it easy,” she explained. “It’s very difficult to get out of it because there is a mental washout. There is a whole job that is put in place to isolate us, diminish us, humiliate us”, had then confided Lio, on his past as a battered woman. “My sister never gave up. And one day, I left and I filed a complaint,” she confided in 2003 to Thierry Ardisson on the set of Everyone speaks about it.
She had explained the moment that had finally been the trigger to file a complaint against the man who shared her life and get out of this hold. “I only managed to file a complaint when he started beating me while I was breastfeeding the twins. Because I was afraid for them.” But even after having managed to speak and file a complaint, it is a long and painful administrative journey strewn with pitfalls “Another hell has begun: the fight with the police, with the filing of a complaint, with the family court judge… We don’t end it! As Christine Angot says: ‘We manage’, it’s true, but it’s so long, it’s so violent, so difficult”, Lio said with Gala.