By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Dec 14 2000 (IPS)

Actress and tango singer Libertad Lamarque was a star in Argentina in the 1930s and 1940s, acting in the first “talkies” (films with sound), but in other Latin American countries her popularity remained strong through to the present, even as she reached 92, thanks to her work in soap operas.

Her long and seemingly tireless career ended Tuesday, Dec 12, as she succumbed to pneumonia in Mexico City, during a vacation from filming the soap opera, “Carita de Angel” (Angel Face), in which she played a nun in charge of a boarding school.

As an actress, she was the heroine in her first efforts in Argentina, later playing the role of mother in a series of films and, towards the end, grandmother in Mexican and Venezuelan soap operas, some of which were broadcast in her native Argentina.

Between the initial phase that turned her into a legend, and the present, there was a turning point. It was an event that may or may not be true – as is the case of myths – but that led to her very real exile to Mexico in 1946.

The tale, which she herself denies in her memoirs, is that during the filming of “La cabalgata del circo” (Circus Procession) in 1945 – when Lamarque was already well known throughout Latin America – she reprimanded a novice actress for dawdling, and slapped her.

The victim of the legendary blow was Eva Duarte, who would later become known as Evita, wife of president Juan Perón.

Whether or not the incident really happened, confrontation did, according to Lamarque and, on top of the anarchist ideology in which the actress was brought up, it meant exile – from which she never returned.

She would later visit Buenos Aires only for brief periods and to act in films or theatre, or to receive the many awards bestowed upon her, but she spent the last years of her life between Mexico City and Miami.

Before leaving Argentina, Lamarque had been a tango singer in theatres and nightclubs, in addition to acting – since she was a young child – in her father’s touring theatre troupe. But it was in the 1930s that she became a popular figure, turning into the ideal woman of the educated middle class.

A beautiful woman with a fresh complexion who cultivated her childlike, innocent and upstanding image, she transformed into a personality capable of exporting the Argentine middle class model of social mobility for the entire region.

Among her most remembered tangos are “El Tatuaje” (Tattoo), “A Montmartre,” “Adiós Argentina” and “Déjalo” (Leave It), and her most applauded soap operas – a genre she embarked on in her older years – were the Venezuelan “Esmeralda” and “Mamá,” and Mexico’s “Soledad” and “La Usurpadora” (The Usurper).

Lamarque would take it upon herself to oversee the scripts of the movies in which she starred to make sure her character always ended up safe and sound. She even changed the endings of some films, including “Ayudame a vivir” (Help Me to Live).

Her image and her art became so popular in countries like Chile, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, that in Havana they gave her the nickname “Sweetheart of the Americas.”

Unlike most women, in an era when it was not easy for them to stand out as artists without being condemned as having loose morals, Lamarque passed the test and won a place as a true ambassador of Argentine tango and film.

Her life story is one that moves just about everyone. From early childhood, she worked with her father, a poor anarchist labourer who had created a theatre company in order to raise funds for political prisoners.

Fate tried to marginalize her because of her politics, but Lamarque at least had sufficient economic resources and fame to confront the obstacles that came up, some even created by her fans.

At the peak of her stardom in the 1930s, she turned down a Hollywood offer to join the ranks of international film casts for fear the directors wanted to hire her and keep her “in a greenhouse.”

Her first film with a soundtrack in Argentina was “Tango.” Her starring role in that movie, and in the many others that followed, proved that in addition to her acting and singing talents she held a professional sense of how to use the lighting and sound, and how to take advantage of the camera.

In Argentina, her bright star had already begun to dim, along with the passing of her many fans who were youngsters in the 1930s and 1940s. But her death is a reminder of the dream of social mobility, which, at least in today’s Latin America, seems increasingly out of reach.

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