The most famous people from Brazil are the footballer Pelé, the only man to win three World Cups (1958, 1962 and 1970); the racing driver Ayrton Senna, Formula One world champion in 1988, 1990 and 1991; the forward Marta, six times FIFA World Player of the Year; the architect Oscar Niemeyer, who designed the government buildings of Brasília; the novelist Paulo Coelho, whose 1988 book The Alchemist has been translated into more than 65 languages; and the composer Tom Jobim, who wrote “The Girl from Ipanema”. Behind that export list stands a second rank of Brazilians who are household names at home but far less known abroad, from the novelist Machado de Assis to the aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont, and a third group who made their names outside Brazil altogether. This guide takes them in that order.
Pelé, Senna and Marta: Brazilians the whole world knows
Pelé (1940–2022) was born Edson Arantes do Nascimento in Três Corações, Minas Gerais, and signed for the Santos club at 15. He played in his first World Cup final in Sweden in 1958 at 17, still the youngest player to win the tournament, and added winner’s medals in Chile in 1962 and Mexico in 1970. Guinness records his 1,279 goals in 1,363 games, a count that includes exhibition matches. When he died in December 2022, Brazil declared three days of national mourning.
Ayrton Senna (1960–1994) grew up in São Paulo and entered his first kart race at 13 at Interlagos; his first go-kart had been built by his father around a small lawnmower engine. At McLaren in 1988 he and Alain Prost won 15 of the season’s 16 Grands Prix, and Senna took three drivers’ titles in four years. He won 41 races and held the record for pole positions, 65, when he was killed while leading the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola on 1 May 1994. About three million people attended his funeral in São Paulo.
Marta (born 1986), Marta Vieira da Silva, is the women’s game’s equivalent. She has been named FIFA World Player of the Year six times, holds the record for most goals at Women’s World Cups with 17, and as of 2025 had scored 122 times for Brazil, more than any other player. She now plays in the United States for Orlando Pride.
Brazil’s cultural exports are just as recognisable. Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) designed the National Congress, the Cathedral of Brasília, the Palácio da Alvorada and the Palácio do Planalto, all designed by 1960 for President Juscelino Kubitschek’s new capital, though the cathedral was not dedicated until May 1970. He won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1988 and was still working when he died in Rio de Janeiro ten days short of his 105th birthday. Tom Jobim (1927–1994), born Antônio Carlos Jobim in Rio, helped invent bossa nova by merging samba with cool jazz; “The Girl from Ipanema” is believed to be the second-most-recorded pop song in history, and the 1964 album Getz/Gilberto that carried it abroad won the Grammy for Album of the Year. Paulo Coelho (born 1947, Rio de Janeiro) first published The Alchemist with a small house that printed 900 copies and declined to reprint it; his books have since sold about 320 million copies in 83 languages.
The one fashion name on most lists is Gisele Bündchen (born 1980), a sixth-generation German Brazilian from Horizontina in Rio Grande do Sul, who topped the Forbes list of highest-paid models every year from 2005 to 2016.
Machado de Assis, Princess Isabel and Santos-Dumont: heroes at home
Ask a Brazilian schoolchild for a great writer and the answer is rarely Coelho. It is Machado de Assis (1839–1908), born in the Morro do Livramento in Rio de Janeiro, the grandson of freed slaves, who taught himself French, English, German and Greek. His novels The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881) and Dom Casmurro (1899) are the core of the Brazilian canon, and in 1897 he founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters and served as its first president.
Princess Isabel (1846–1921), heir to Emperor Pedro II, governed as regent three times while her father travelled. On 13 May 1888 she signed the Lei Áurea, the Golden Law, which ended slavery in Brazil outright. It earned her the title “the Redemptress” and helped cost her family the throne: the monarchy fell to a military coup the following year, and she died in exile in France.
Brazilians also have their own answer to the question of who flew first. Alberto Santos-Dumont (1873–1932), a coffee planter’s son from Minas Gerais who spent most of his adult life in Paris, won the Deutsch Prize in 1901 by flying his airship No. 6 around the Eiffel Tower. On 23 October 1906 he flew about 60 metres in the fixed-wing 14-bis at the Bagatelle field in Paris, taking off under its own power without a launch rail, and on 12 November he covered 220 metres in front of a crowd. In Brazil those flights, rather than the Wright brothers’ less public trials of 1903, are taught as the start of powered aviation.
Science has its own domestic hero in Carlos Chagas (1879–1934). Working for the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in 1909, he identified the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, found it in the blood of a two-year-old girl named Berenice, and described the insect-borne illness now called Chagas disease. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1913 and 1921 but never received it.
Vargas, Kubitschek and Chico Mendes: the political names on Brazil’s map
Two presidents dominate Brazilian political memory. Getúlio Vargas (1882–1954) took power in the Revolution of 1930, ruled until 1945, partly as a dictator under the Estado Novo, and returned as elected president in 1951. A political crisis ended in his suicide in August 1954, midway through that second term. Juscelino Kubitschek (1902–1976), a doctor from Diamantina in Minas Gerais, was president from 1956 to 1961 and campaigned on “fifty years of progress in five”. His lasting monument is Brasília, built on the central plateau and inaugurated as the capital in 1960; the story of that move is told in our guide to Brasília, Brazil’s planned capital.
Chico Mendes (1944–1988) was born on a rubber estate outside Xapuri in the state of Acre and tapped rubber as a boy. As a union leader he organised tappers to block the clearing of forest for cattle ranches, and argued that people who lived from the standing forest should be given reserves to protect it. He was murdered at his home on 22 December 1988. Brazil’s federal agency for protected areas, the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, carries his name.
The arts have their own home-grown pantheon. The painter Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973), from Capivari in São Paulo state, painted Abaporu in 1928, the canvas that inspired Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagic Manifesto and the idea that Brazil should “devour” foreign culture and remake it. The composer Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959), from Rio, blended folk tunes with Bach in his nine Bachianas Brasileiras. The novelist Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) is claimed by Brazil though she was born Chaya Lispector in Chechelnyk, in today’s Ukraine; her Jewish family fled the pogroms and reached Brazil before she was two, and she grew up in Recife. Her last novel, The Hour of the Star (1977), is now read far beyond the Portuguese-speaking world.
Carmen Miranda to Wagner Moura: Brazilians who made their names abroad
The diaspora list begins with an emigrant twice over. Carmen Miranda (1909–1955) was born in Marco de Canaveses in northern Portugal and taken to Rio as a baby. She became a samba star at home in the 1930s, then went to Broadway and Hollywood, where she made 14 films between 1940 and 1953, wore the fruit hats of The Gang’s All Here (1943) and, by 1945, was the highest-paid woman in the United States. She was the first South American honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Bossa nova went abroad with her successors. Sérgio Mendes (1941–2024), born in Niterói across Guanabara Bay from Rio, played Carnegie Hall’s bossa nova festival in 1962; his 1966 recording of Jorge Ben’s “Mas que nada” was a hit in English-speaking markets, and he re-recorded it with the Black Eyed Peas in 2006. He had moved to the United States in 1964, and the US remained the base for most of his touring for the rest of his career.
Sebastião Salgado (1944–2025), born in Aimorés, Minas Gerais, trained as an economist, took a doctorate in Paris and only then turned to photography. He worked for Magnum Photos from 1979 to 1994, founded his own agency, Amazonas Images, in Paris, and photographed in more than 120 countries. At home, he and his wife Lélia spent the 1990s restoring a stretch of Atlantic Forest in Minas Gerais, and in 1998 turned about 6,900 hectares into a reserve run by their Instituto Terra. He died in Paris in May 2025.
The most recent name is Wagner Moura (born 1976), from Bahia, who reached English-language audiences as Pablo Escobar in the Netflix series Narcos. For The Secret Agent (2025) he became the first South American actor to win Best Actor at Cannes and the first Brazilian to win the Golden Globe for Best Actor.
Some diaspora stories run in reverse. Marta built most of her club career in Sweden and the United States; Coelho has long lived in Europe; Niemeyer spent the years after the 1964 coup working from Paris. What they share is that they never stopped being claimed at home. Their work also carries Portuguese abroad, and with about 267 million native speakers it is the most widely spoken language in the Southern Hemisphere, a story covered in our page on the language spoken in Brazil.
Why the Brazilian list tilts toward football and music
Put the three groups together and a pattern appears. The Brazilians best known outside the country are overwhelmingly athletes and musicians, people whose work needs no translation from Portuguese. Pelé, Senna, Marta, Jobim and Miranda travelled through stadiums, circuits and records. Machado de Assis and Lispector, whose reputations rest on the Portuguese sentence, waited decades for good translations, and Machado is still far better known in Rio than in London or New York.
The domestic list also reflects the order of Brazil’s history. Isabel belongs to the empire, Santos-Dumont and Chagas to the early republic, Vargas and Kubitschek to the push to industrialise and settle the interior, and Chico Mendes to the late-20th-century fight over the Amazon. Football runs through all of it: Brazil won five World Cups between 1958 and 2002, and the game’s place in national life is set out in our guide to the national sport of Brazil, the natural next stop after Pelé.