Paulo Coelho was born in Rio
de Janeiro, Brazil, and attended a Jesuit school.
As a teenager, Coelho wanted to become a writer. Upon telling his mother this,
she responded, "My dear, your father is an engineer. He's a logical,
reasonable man with a very clear vision of the world. Do you actually know what
it means to be a writer?" At 17, Coelho's introversion and opposition to
following a traditional path led to his parents committing him to a mental institution from which he escaped
three times before being released at the age of 20. Coelho was born into a
Catholic family, and his parents were strict about the religion and faith. Coelho
later remarked that "It wasn't that they wanted to hurt me, but they
didn't know what to do... They did not do that to destroy me, they did that to
save me." At his parents' wishes, Coelho enrolled in law school and
abandoned his dream of becoming a writer. One year later, he dropped out and
lived life as a hippie, traveling through South America, North Africa, Mexico,
and Europe and started using drugs in
the 1960s.
Upon his return to Brazil, Coelho worked as a songwriter,
composing lyrics for Elis Regina, Rita Lee,
and Brazilian icon Raul
Seixas. Composing with Raul led to Coelho being associated with magic and
occultism, due to the content of some songs. In 1974, by his account, he was
arrested for "subversive" activities and tortured by the ruling military government, who had
taken power ten years earlier and viewed his lyrics as left-wing and dangerous.
Coelho also worked as an actor, journalist and theatre director before pursuing
his writing career.
Coelho married artist Christina Oiticica in 1980. Together they
had previously spent half the year in Rio de Janeiro and the other half in a
country house in the Pyrenees Mountains of France, but now the pair reside
permanently in Geneva, Switzerland.
In 1986 Coelho walked the 500-plus mile Road
of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. On the path, he had a
spiritual awakening, which he described autobiographically in The
Pilgrimage. In an interview, Coelho stated "[In 1986], I was very
happy in the things I was doing. I was doing something that gave me food and
water – to use the metaphor in The Alchemist, I was working, I had a person
whom I loved, I had money, but I was not fulfilling my dream. My dream was, and
still is, to be a writer." Coelho
would leave his lucrative career as a songwriter and pursue writing full-time.
The Pilgrim – Story of Paulo Coelho is the
international title for the biographical film Não Pare na Pista, a co-production between
Brazil’s Dama Filmes and the Spanish Babel Films, in which the younger and
older Coelho are played by two different actors. One of the producers, Iôna de
Macêdo, told Screen International: "The film tells the
story of a man who has a dream. It's a little like Alice in Wonderland – he's someone who is
too big for his house." The film, shot in Portuguese, had its premiere in
Brazilian Theaters on 2014, and was internationally distributed in 2015.
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