• File.

    Read all the interviews on the back cover of EL MUNDO

(Buenos Aires, 1929).

Actor.

He is a legend that resists being one and is still active with no plan to stop.

Tomorrow he will perform at the Úbeda Festival with

Lo que venrá

, a tribute to Astor Piazzolla, master of tango.

Are you still working at the age of 91 by vocation, custom or necessity? 92! That I fulfill them next week. I practice my profession with the same enthusiasm, the same possibilities and the same concern, but with more years. The only thing that changes is that the space of what I can and what I have left is shrinking, but there we are. I am happy, but it is true that I cannot stop either. I am not retired because, if I were, the pension that corresponds to me does not give me to continue maintaining a lifestyle in which I do not have great luxuries, but you have to pay for gas, telephone, food, light, which rises every day ... So actors with a successful career do not live like marquises. It is a totally false myth! Whoever tells you that, pass it on to me, I'm going to tell him the truth. I dont complain,But with my 92 years I have to keep working to pay the bills. Luckily, I'm in good health and offers are coming in. Concha Velasco has retired this month from the tables because her children asked her to. I imagine that yours, Ernesto and Malena, will understand you better, by dedicating themselves to the same thing. Fortunately. And there is one more addition: I am really proud of them because they have understood very well, with total precision, what this profession is like, both with respect to me and with respect to them. They carry it out with respect and they are both working hard and well. So I feel very proud and, what in this profession is a luxury, very calm with their lives and their careers. Was it always like that or did it concern you that they followed in your footsteps? No, no, worse ... I refused! I absolutely refused to let them be actors.Now I am speaking with this tranquility after many years of profession on their part, but when I saw that they liked the theater, I tried by all means to make them start with something else, anyone that gave them a way out other than being an actress or actor. . They ignored me ... fortunately. And now I am very proud of them. In Úbeda he participates in 'Lo que venrá', a tribute to the centenary of Astor Piazzolla, one of the great legends of tango. You can get the Argentine out of Argentina, but not Argentina out of the Argentine ... Piazzolla and Horacio Ferrer, the poet who was his great collaborator and whose texts I recite, are part of the history of Argentina. I am fortunate because for me it is an indescribable pleasure to do tango and purely Argentine things. They are coincidences that I am not specifically looking for, but they are special.I also met both of them, Piazzolla and Ferrer, with whom I was a close friend, when he was still living in Buenos Aires. They put music to a play that I was representing and I was a faithful spectator of their concerts. It is always beautiful to remember that life that seems to be another. Does the wound of an exile heal? It depends, it goes by times. Lately I'm feeling it more because I haven't been to Argentina for seven years. When they gave me the OK that I could return safely, I was going quite often, but now the pandemic has come together and that I do not have job offers from there and I have not gone. I am feeling the need to go back. Fundamentally, I want to travel in advance all the places of my childhood and my adolescence to see how they have been, how much it corresponds to the memories that I have without erasing in my mind. That is my desire now,because time goes by and I can't risk it: I don't know if I'm going to stay alive for seven years or seven months, so I have to take advantage and get on with it. He had to escape from Argentina in 1975 because of death threats, towards You and your family, from the extreme right-wing Triple A. Does fear ever completely disappear? It is a memory that no longer affects me, but for many years, even though I was safe in Spain, I always had it in mind. It was very hard. As soon as I knew that the threats were serious, I took my wife and children out of there, Malena being a baby and Ernesto four years old, and we began a new life that was insecure, vague and with an uncertain future. It's hard to live in a place not chosenbut in those situations you discover who is who and in Spain I found people who generously helped me without knowing me at all and without any benefit for them. I have never forgotten that, I have it fixed in my memory and it helped me to cope with that situation that I do not wish on anyone. But the passage of time took me to other places and gave me other things, like being able to work a lot in Italy or France when I was in Spain, and I remade my life here. Some things for the other. I am not saying that I have to thank the threat for anything and I paid a high personal price for it, but, always with the generous support of my wife next to me, another good life came out of that, and with its advantages. Are you worried about its current boom? Yes and no. It worries me because any growth of the extreme right is negative and dangerous,but here in Spain it still does not appear so much as to be alarmed. Although it is very close, huh. I am concerned that this growth will continue, but I believe that it is not yet a serious threat. Josep Maria Pou affirms that being an actor made him a better person because it taught him to put himself in anyone's place. With such a long career, you must be a saint. Don't believe it, no (laughs). I do not feel that being an actor has made me better, but there is one thing that helps me a lot and that is to always keep in mind that there is a man that I have not seen in my life who pays a ticket, from which I live, and sits in an armchair waiting to offer you a moment of happiness or entertainment. Although I have performed that show 150 times, that man is only going to see it once and I cannot allow him to feel that for me it is another day. I have to offer each viewer a premiere.Every day that I go to work, I have to function like the first and that revitalizes me and makes me feel important in the face of a great responsibility. That is why I am still here.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • Final Interview

  • cinema

  • theater

  • Argentina

  • music

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