Doris Dragovic
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Doris Dragovic (born April 16, 1961) is a Croatian singer, born in Split, Croatia.
She sings pop music, and has been known to support the Torcida football fans.
In 1999, her performance of the dramatic song "Marija Magdalena" beat 23 other entries to win Croatia's annual epic-length Dora contest, which entitled her to represent the country in the Eurovision Song Contest, organised that year in Jerusalem.
She achieved fourth place in the 1999 contest, a very respectable result given that she was drawn early in the singing order. This is considered to have become a particular disadvantage since public televoting was introduced as the principal means of determining the winner in 1998. After two hours of wall-to-wall music, the public are understandably much more likely to vote for the songs that are fresh in their minds. Part of the explanation of how Doris overcame this problem was that she joined what at the time was the relatively exclusive - but now rapidly growing - club of Eurovision artists that have used the attention-grabbing ploy of unexpectedly ripping off an item of clothing midway through their song. Doris' strip now seems the epitome of modesty and discretion compared to the in-your-face setpiece moments served up in recent years by the likes of Marie N and Sakis Rouvas, but it earned her a loud cheer and gave potential televoters something extra to remember her by.
Doris' showing remains one of Croatia's best results since it started competing as a nation in its own right, as distinct from the old Yugoslavia, which was unique as the only communist country that ever took part in the Eurovision. Doris herself had tasted the contest in that very different era - when it was old-fashioned juries that awarded the points - by representing Yugoslavia in ESC 1986 with the song Željo moja ("My desire"). However, she had been considerably less successful on that occasion, finishing only eleventh.