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Studies & Youth "Born in Madrid on 21 January 1941, and he had the luck to have parents who were musicians and theater people" His father, Plácido Domingo, Sr., and his mother, Pepita Embil, were stars of the zarzuela, the Spanish form of operetta. In 1949, when he was eight, they created a company of their own in Mexico, and his younger sister and he joined them there. For the following thirteen years, Mexico City was his home. He went to school there and, like most other Spanish and Latin American boys, he developed a passion for soccer football and the corrida. Soccer is still one of his great loves, mainly as a spectator, but occasionally as a participant in benefit games. In addition, he took piano lessons from the age of eight and spent a good deal of time with his parents' theater company, where he learned about almost all the elements of musical theater, including its tough economic realities. José Responsibility At the age of fourteen, he entered Mexico's National Conservatory of Music, but he faced severe difficulties when he married at sixteen and became a father at seventeen. Even today, he finds this episode difficult to discuss, but it explaines why he has a forty-eight-year-old son, José, and why he had to begin so early to work hard at an exceptional variety of musical and theatrical jobs. Career Start Vocal instruction from his parents He started by accompanying his mother's recitals and singing minor baritone roles in his parents' company; He had already had some vocal instruction from his parents and at the Conservatory. He was then given a small part in the first Mexican production of "My Fair Lady", which ran for 185 performances; he accompanied other singers at elegant and not so elegant bars; he sang 170 performances of "The Merry Widow"; he performed in a musical called "The Redhead"; he played piano for a touring ballet company; he had his own music program on a new cultural television station in Mexico City; he performed secondary roles as an actor in television productions of dramas by Pirandello, Benavente, García Lorca, and Chekhov, and he selected the background music for the series; he trained choruses for zarzuelas and musicals; and he did arrangements and adaptations of American pop songs for Mexican recording artists – and even sang back-up parts in some of them! In one way or another, all of these activities were of great use to him later on.