Born and Raised in Rio

Rio de Janeiro has a habit of getting credit for talent that actually comes from elsewhere in Brazil, and just as often loses credit for people it did produce. Here's an honest list, the city of Rio de Janeiro specifically, not the wider state, with the record corrected where it's usually wrong.

Romário, born in the Jacarezinho favela and part of Brazil's 1994 World Cup-winning squad, is Rio to the core. So is Zico, born Arthur Antunes Coimbra in Quintino Bocaiúva and nicknamed the Little Rooster of Quintino, widely considered one of the greatest players never to win a World Cup. Adriano, born in the Vila Cruzeiro favela, and Vágner Love round out a strong Rio-born football lineage, alongside Formula 1's three-time world champion Nelson Piquet. Two commonly assumed to be cariocas actually aren't: Ronaldinho was born in Porto Alegre, in Brazil's south, and Bebeto was born in Salvador, Bahia, both simply becoming Rio-associated through their club careers.

Tom Jobim was born in Tijuca and grew up in Ipanema from infancy, and it shows in nearly everything he wrote, The Girl from Ipanema chief among it. Vinicius de Moraes, his songwriting partner, was born in Gávea. Cazuza, the rock icon who became a symbol of Brazil's AIDS-awareness movement in the 1980s, was born in Botafogo. Marisa Monte and Jorge Ben Jor are both Rio-born, and two of the biggest names in Brazilian pop right now, Anitta and Ludmilla, both grew up in Rio's North Zone. Carmen Miranda is the great exception worth knowing properly: she was actually born in Portugal and arrived in Rio at ten months old, so the city shaped her entirely even though it isn't, technically, her birthplace. João Gilberto, despite being called the father of bossa nova, a genre inseparable from Rio, was born in Bahia and moved to Rio as an adult.

Machado de Assis, generally regarded as Brazil's greatest novelist, was born on Morro do Livramento in central Rio, the son of freed slaves. Oscar Niemeyer, who went on to design Brasília's modernist landmarks, was born in Laranjeiras and died in Rio in 2012 at 104. Two names need a more careful sentence: Clarice Lispector was born in Ukraine and immigrated to Brazil as an infant, raised first in Recife before Rio became her adult, adopted literary home, and Roberto Burle Marx, the landscape architect behind Copacabana's wave-pattern promenade, was born in São Paulo but moved to Rio at around age four and built his entire career there.

Fernanda Montenegro, born in the Campinho neighborhood, became the first Brazilian actress ever nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, for Central Station in 1998. A few names that get assumed Rio and aren't: Wagner Moura and Alice Braga were both born and raised elsewhere, Salvador and São Paulo respectively, and Gisele Bündchen, despite the recurring confusion with the city's name, was born in Horizontina, in Brazil's far south, and has no connection to Rio de Janeiro at all.

Main sources: Britannica; Wikipedia; official biographies and interviews for the individual figures named above.