Noted Argentine actor Federico Luppi dies at 83.
Federico Luppi, a dignified Argentine actor well known for his complex performances died on Friday in Buenos Aires. He was 83.
The cause was complications of a subdural hematoma that developed after a fall at his home in April, said his wife, the actress Susana Hornos.
Luppi’s career, which began in the mid-1960s, included dozens of film and television roles, often in Argentine productions. Slim and stately with a shock of white hair, he endowed his characters with a sense of gravity.
Born in Ramallo, northwest of Buenos Aires, in 1934 to poor Italian immigrants, he studied architecture and worked in a slaughterhouse and a bank before he was able to support himself as an actor.
He was blacklisted from Argentine productions for some years after he was openly critical of the 1976-81 dictatorship of Gen. Jorge Videla.
He was also beset by a rocky personal life, including an acrimonious divorce to co-star Haydée Padilla in 1987, and a child support dispute over an illegitimate son born in Uruguay in 1999. Argentina's collapse in 2001 forced Luppi to emigrate to Spain; he returned in 2008.
Despite those difficulties, he remained a prolific actor, active in theater, television and film.
Luppi is best remembered in Argentina for two thrillers by the Argentine director Adolfo Aristarain: as a demolitions expert who stages an accident in order to expose an unscrupulous mining firm in “Time for Revenge” (1981); and as a contract killer who has tables turned on him in “Last Days of the Victim” (1982).
He also won acclaim for his role as a naive small-businessman in the tragedy “Sweet Money” (1982); as a political idealist who organized rural shepherds in “A Place in the World” (1992); and as a dying literature professor who tries to start a new life in “Common Ground” (2002).
Luppi later starred in three films by famed Mexican director Guillermo del Toro: as an antiques dealer turned into a vampire in “Cronos” (1993); as a leftist sympathizer who ran a haunted orphanage in Franco’s Spain in “The Devil’s Backbone” (2001); and the monarch of a fairy kingdom in “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006), which won three Academy Awards in 2007.
Writing in Spanish on Twitter, del Toro called him “our Olivier, our Day Lewis, our genius, my dear friend.”
At: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/obituaries/federico-luppi-83-actor-known-for-del-toro-films-dies.html
“When you've learned everything, then you die.” Federico Luppi, 1934-2017.
