As a teen rising up in Rio de Janeiro, Léa Garcia pored over books by the French existentialists Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, dreaming of turning into a author. Her father was a plumber, and her late mom had been a seamstress. Ms. Garcia needed one thing extra from life and appeared to search out it sooner or later in 1950 at a tram station close to the seaside.
“I used to be on my option to decide up my grandmother to take her to the flicks,” she recalled a long time later, “when somebody got here as much as me and requested, ‘Would you wish to work in theater?’”
The person launched himself as Abdias do Nascimento, a Brazilian author, artist and political activist, who had acknowledged Ms. Garcia from a mutual pal’s description. He defined that he needed her to work together with his theater troupe, the Black Experimental Theater — recognized by its Portuguese acronym, TEN — which promoted Afro-Brazilian tradition at a time when Black Brazilian actors have been restricted to stereotypical roles, or have been distributed with altogether in lieu of White actors in blackface.
Ms. Garcia had by no means carried out onstage. However inside two years, at age 19, she was dancing and reciting poetry in a TEN manufacturing referred to as “Rapsódia Negra,” or “Black Rhapsody.” By the tip of the last decade, she would acquire wider recognition via her first display position, within the Oscar-winning 1959 movie “Black Orpheus,” which set the Greek delusion of Orpheus and Eurydice within the favelas of Rio de Janeiro throughout Carnival.
The movie propelled her on an performing profession that spanned greater than six a long time and 100 movie, tv and theater credit, together with in widespread telenovelas that aired around the globe. “She positioned Brazil on an inventive degree by no means seen earlier than, at a time when black Brazilian ladies have been recognized in a pejorative approach,” Afonso Borges, a Brazilian creator and journalist, wrote in a tribute on X, the platform previously often called Twitter.
Ms. Garcia, who was credited with serving to to develop the alternatives obtainable to Black Brazilian actors on the stage and display, died Aug. 15 at 90 within the resort metropolis of Gramado, Brazil. Her household stated she had a coronary heart assault there shortly earlier than she was scheduled to just accept a lifetime achievement honor on the metropolis’s annual movie competition.
Together with Black actors together with Ruth de Souza and Zezé Motta, Ms. Garcia leveraged her success in Brazil to focus on the discrimination confronted by dark-skinned individuals in a rustic that had relied on the labor of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans earlier than abolishing slavery in 1888. “It’s not shameful to be a slave, however to be a colonizer,” she instructed the newspaper O Globo final yr.
Ms. Garcia was solid in “Black Orpheus” after showing in a distinct position in Vinicius de Moraes’s 1956 play “Orfeu da Conceição,” which served because the movie’s supply materials. Directed by French filmmaker Marcel Camus, the film helped introduce the world to the sounds of bossa nova, via its percussive soundtrack by Luiz Bonfá and Antônio Carlos Jobim. And whereas it was dismissed by many Brazilians who noticed the movie as exoticizing Afro-Brazilian tradition, the film gained the highest prize on the Cannes Movie Pageant, acquired the Academy Award for greatest international language movie and “stood for many years as one of the vital widespread movies ever imported to the U.S.,” movie critic Michael Atkinson wrote in a 2010 essay for the Criterion Assortment.
The film starred Marpessa Daybreak because the doomed Eurydice, who falls in love with a trolley driver and guitarist (Breno Mello) on the streets of Rio. Ms. Garcia performed Eurydice’s bewitching cousin, Serafina, and drew reward from critics together with Bosley Crowther of the New York Occasions, who wrote that she was “particularly frightening” within the position.
She went on to seem in Camus’s follow-up movie, “Os Bandeirantes” (1960), also called “Gold of the Amazon,” and have become well-known in Brazil for portraying a villainous enslaved lady within the 1976 telenovela “Escrava Isaura” (“Isaura: Slave Lady”), which reportedly reached an viewers of tons of of hundreds of thousands worldwide and have become successful in China.
Again house, Ms. Garcia stated she was generally slapped and pinched by Brazilians who had hassle separating her from the nefarious character she performed within the present — a lady, Ms. Garcia famous, who was merely making an attempt to outlive the brutality of enslavement, even when it meant turning in opposition to the title character, a light-skinned enslaved lady performed by Lucélia Santos.
“I usually say that the gods embraced me, issues at all times arrived for me with out me working after them,” Ms. Garcia instructed Ela journal, an O Globo publication, in 2022. Nonetheless, she added, she and different Black actors have been routinely held to greater requirements than their White colleagues. “We needed to arrive with the textual content on the tip of our tongue, at all times smelling good and stylish. Others could possibly be flawed. We couldn’t. We might play subservient characters, however we would have liked to indicate that we ourselves weren’t.”
Léa Lucas Garcia de Aguiar was born in Rio de Janeiro on March 11, 1933. Her mom, who made garments for rich ladies within the metropolis’s tree-lined Laranjeiras neighborhood, died when Ms. Garcia was 11. She was later raised by her grandmother, who labored as a maid.
Ms. Garcia stated that when she was younger, her mom would gown her just like the Hollywood little one star Shirley Temple and demand on straightening her curly black hair. She grew to become conscious of racial points in Brazilian society solely after assembly Nascimento, with whom she quickly had two sons, Henrique and Abdias. A wedding to Armando Aguiar, with whom she had one other son, Marcelo, led to divorce.
Along with her three sons, survivors embrace a half sister; three grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and a great-great-granddaughter.
For years, Ms. Garcia was solid in display roles as maids, housekeepers and enslaved ladies, characters that required her to put on “the poorest material or the best footwear,” as she put it. Progressively she started taking part in extra refined characters, akin to a historical past instructor on the 1980 TV present “Marina,” for which she stated she rewrote a monologue in regards to the Quilombo dos Palmares, a Seventeenth-century group of escaped enslaved individuals, to supply a much less Eurocentric view on the topic.
She was nonetheless working lately, partnering with a staff of Black filmmakers for the 2020 film “A Day With Jerusa” and returning to the stage final yr, at 89, to play three separate roles within the play “Life Is Not Honest,” primarily based on a e-book by Andréa Pachá. By then she was recognized for her outspoken views on social points, together with abortion rights and the legalization of marijuana, though she acknowledged that one in all her characters within the play — an adulterous older lady recognized on-line as Molhadinha25 — made her uneasy.
“At first, I believed I shouldn’t play her due to my age. Then I noticed that it was my prejudice,” she instructed Ela with amusing. “Folks love Molhadinha.”