Charytín — María del Rosario Goico Rodríguez, born 23 May 1949 in Santa Lucía, El Seibo — is a Dominican singer, comedian, actress and television host, one of the most enduring personalities of Spanish-language entertainment across five decades, from Puerto Rican variety television to Miami-based Univision.

A Montenegrin surname, a Spanish exile

Her father, the Dominican lawyer Salvador Goico Morel, descended from Gerónimo Goicovich, a Montenegrin who had settled generations earlier in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico — a line that also produced her cousin, the television host Freddy Beras-Goico. Her mother, María del Rosario Rodríguez, was a Spanish lawyer from Asturias who had gone into exile under Francisco Franco. When her parents separated, her mother took her and her sister to Spain; the family did not return to the Dominican Republic until her parents reconciled, almost ten years later.

«Alexandra», and the OTI

In 1974 Charytín represented the Dominican Republic at the third OTI Festival, in Acapulco, singing «Alexandra» to a fifth-place finish; she followed Niní Cáffaro as the country’s representative and was in turn succeeded by Luchi Vicioso in 1975. «Alexandra» stuck as her signature song, and a comic character from her own television show gave its name to another hit, «Mosquita Muerta», which topped charts across Mexico, Venezuela and the rest of Latin America.

Puerto Rico and «Las rosas blancas»

She had moved to Puerto Rico earlier that decade, where the producer and television actor Elín Ortiz — recently separated from the vedette Iris Chacón — became her manager; they married in 1974 and stayed married until his death in 2016. Her weekly variety show ran on WAPA-TV, Canal 4, every Sunday night until 1985, mixing elegant staging with guest slots for artists from across Latin America; a special episode Ortiz wrote and directed for the same channel, «Las rosas blancas», won a Peabody Award in the United States.

Film, a producer from Madrid, and a cancelled telenovela

In the early 1980s she starred opposite the Mexican actor Julio Alemán in the film «Prohibido amar en Nueva York», whose soundtrack produced two more hits, «Tiempo» and «Para llegar». In 1985 she recorded «Verdades desnudas», produced by the Spanish singer-songwriter Camilo Sesto, and the following year she joined Iris Chacón, the Dominican-Mexican actor Andrés García and the Puerto Rican singer Yolandita Monge in the telenovela «Escándalo», which underperformed and was cut short.

Family, Miami, and «Escándalo TV»

Her son Shalim, born in 1979, went on to his own career as a singer and actor; the family moved to Miami in 1988, and Charytín had twins, Alexander and Sharinna, around 1990. She returned to television full-time in 2002 to host the celebrity gossip show «Escándalo TV» for Univision’s TeleFutura, alongside Marisa del Portillo, Felipe Viel and Lilia Luciano, and later fronted her own program, simply titled «Charytín», on Mega TV from 2013.

Legacy

In 2003 the Asociación de Cronistas de Espectáculos de Nueva York gave her its Premio Extraordinario ACE por Distinción y Mérito, and in 2007 the Asociación de Cronistas de Arte awarded her El Soberano for her career in Dominican entertainment. In 2022, at seventy-three, she published an autobiography, «El tiempo pasa... ¡pero yo no!», writing for the first time about the private difficulties behind more than fifty years spent, by her own description, as a whirlwind of a public persona.