In 2005 Lio is celebrating 25 years of an active career. Go for the jubilee !

The character of Lio was born in the Sixties under the hand of the comic strip artist Jean-Claude Forest, author of the famous comic Barbarella. In the second episode, Les colères du mange-minutes, Lio is a lolitesque teenager that Barbarella must save from the bad guys; she proclaims, "Without my pictures, I die !".

The disconcerting resemblance between a youngster of Portuguese origin, brought up in Belgium, of birth name Wanda Maria Ribeiro Furtado Tavares de Vasconcelos, born on June, 17th 1962, and that little character devised by Forest, inspired Lio with both her pseudonym and her identity as an artist.

According to legend, Eric Verwilghem, known as Hagen Dierks, aka Jacques Duvall, (see Otto Preminger&'s, The Man With The Golden Arm) met Lio in Brussels while listening to a Phil Spector record. She was only 14 at the time, the age at which one is impatient to learn, to identify herself instinctively with a culture, with its icons, with its anthems. Jacques Duvall was an aspiring actor, fresh from Jesuit school. A conscientious objector, he did his military service at the media library of Brussels where Wanda&'s mother worked.

By the time he met Lio, he had already made various attempts...

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