Mercedes Blasco (4 September 1867 – 12 April 1961), pseudonym of Conceição Vitória Marques, was a popular Portuguese actor in operettas and variety shows.

She was also a writer, being the first Portuguese actress to write her memoirs, a teacher, translator and journalist, as well as a volunteer nurse in World War I. Mercedes Blasco was born on 4 September 1867 (some sources say 1870) in the mining community of Mina de S. Domingos, located in the Alentejo region of Portugal, from where her mother's family came.

Among these was Farroncas do Zé (1898) in which Blasco played 14 roles, among them the controversial Princess of Caraman-Chimay, in which she wore a Parisian maillot or leotard, the first time such a garment had been worn on a Portuguese stage.

She then went directly to Paris to begin a long season of touring that took in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Her fluency in several languages served her well during the tour and she became very popular with members of several royal families, being asked to give command performances.

During World War I, she enlisted as a nurse with the Red Cross, and treated and helped repatriate Portuguese soldiers in Liège in 1918.

In her book Vagabunda Mercedes she recounted the difficulties she experienced in Brussels during the war because she refused to perform before the German forces.

She found it difficult to find work on the stage as her age did not match the daring artistic performances that had made her famous as a young woman.

In the last months of her son's life they both lived on a small pension granted by the civil governor of Lisbon and on the meagre royalties from her books.

[1][2][3] As a means of support, she continued to write, eventually producing more than thirty works, consisting of autobiographies, novels, plays, and translations.

In Vagabunda Mercedes she inserted a “feminist chapter”, advocating women's cultural and economic emancipation, universal suffrage, and equality between the sexes.