This Sunday, March 10, marks 70 years since the birth who for many was one of the great actors of the national scene: Alejandro Urdapilleta. He participated in iconic Argentine television series such as “Final Time”, “Tumberos” and “Mujeres Asesinas”; from films such as “The Holy Girl”, by Lucrecia Martel, and great consecrated works such as “King Lear” and “Attending to Mr. Sloane”. But above all he is remembered for his performances in “El Palacio de la Risa”. In that iconic 90’s comedy show, hosted by the actor Antonio Gasalla and broadcast on public television, Urdapilleta played characters that were almost always feminine, explosive, with unusual names – “Pepita Pedotti”, “Queca Garda”, “Carloncha Redonda de Grosa”, “Vicenta, la filosa” – in scenes that almost always They ended with him hitting and shaking Humberto Tortonese, the actor with whom he formed a memorable tandem. There were moments so intense that they ended up throwing themselves onto the stands of people watching the program live.
Today, through YouTube and social networks, the cult of his self-confidence seems to continue, especially within gay or quee culturer. The account @a_urdapilleta compiles several of those hilarious performances and the popular meme account @noesdevegana uses the image of Urdapilleta and Tortonese as a meme; the same on Tik Tok. And yet, this being a mixture of macabre clown and Shakespearean actor declared in different interviews that he “just wanted to be someone normal.”
bohemian life
Alejandro Urdapilleta was born in Montevideo on March 10, 1954. He was the son of Fernando Urdapilleta, a military man who had participated in a failed uprising against President Juan Domingo Perón. But, proof of all prejudice, he went on to say that neither he nor his four siblings grew up in a repressive home. When Perón fell, the family returned to Argentina and settled in Martínez, Province of Buenos Aires.
At 17 he saw a play and was so fascinated that he began studying at the Argentine Actors Association with the actor Martín Adjemián. A few years later, acting would serve him well: at the age of 20 he pretended to be crazy so as not to have to do Compulsory Military Service, which he ruled in the country at that time. He even told journalist Leila Guerriero for an article published in La Nación: “in the end I got so involved that it was kind of bad, too. So much acting crazy…”
In 1977, at the age of 23, without having finished high school, he went to London, where he worked as a butler at the residence of the Italian ambassador in England (“The best character I played in my life,” he declared in an interview), and then cleaning houses (“That’s where my bad mood started,” she even pointed out). He lived for a short time in Spain, where he learned about bohemianism and the nocturnal excesses of the post-Franco era – a combination of bars, sex and various drugs – and returned to Argentina. It was 1981 and the military government continued. He even signed up as a volunteer to go to the Malvinas, but they never called him.
The Holy Trinity of Under
In 1983, after the return of democracy, the Buenos Aires cultural scene was abuzz. After taking acting classes with Augusto Fernández, Urdapilleta began performing at the Parakultural, the cathedral of the underground, where he formed a legendary trio with Tortonese and Batato Barea. They cross-dressed, put on makeup and improvised delirious and strident scenes. “We hated theater, what was commonly done: cooperative meetings, text analysis (…) we were against all that,” the actor recalled in an interview for the documentary “La peli de Batato.”
Away from the “psychobolche” theater that bored him so much and from what was done in conventional spaces, Urdapilleta cultivated his kitsch and border humor, with unusual characters such as the Bolivian Zulema Ríos de Mamaní, witness to the charismatic light of the chouí bird or occurrences such as “The Cupbearers.” “There were two cupbearers who were in the back of the bowling alley, they sewed their socks, they didn’t talk about anything. And nothing more. It lasted ten minutes. It was a theft and a mockery of the people. The people delighted. They said Ahhh, how modern,” he said in Guerriero’s interview with him.
In ’89, the trio of actors wrote together “The Cake Maker” and then made “María Julia, la carancha, una dama sinlimitas,” a mockery of María Julia Alsogaray, a congressman during Menemism. In ’91, Batato dies. Urdapilleta and Tortonese paid tribute to him years later when they wrote and performed “La moribunda,” where two sisters care for a third who is dying, while having a delirious conversation.
Established actor
In ’91, together with Tortonese, Urdapilleta began his participation in “El Palacio de la Risa”, and in parallel he played Polonio in the version of “Hamlet”, by William Shakespeare, directed by Ricardo Bartís. The performance earned him his first ACE and he won three more. The last one was in 2000, for playing none other than Hitler in the play “Mein Kampf”, directed by Jorge Lavelli who would direct him again in 2006 in “King Lear”, where Urdapilleta replaced the great actor Alfredo Alcón.
He loved making “important texts” and not “those works in which four girls or four guys talk about the woman, the man, the couple, which are a horror and have no theater at all.” Irreverent and provocative, he said that the San Martín Theater was for “ladies with masks who buy tickets by phone.” “The “King Lear” is going to be filled with ladies in caps thinking about the Pippo noodle they are going to eat after the show. That’s why here you can end up falling into a dead, formal, conventional theater. And people believe that that is theater. Theater can be done in a public bathroom or in an official room, but it has to be alive,” he stated at that time in an interview for Revista Salí.
Urdapilleta was also a writer. He published books like “Wagons Carry Smoke”, chosen by the newspaper Página/12 among the best books of that year, “Long live the lie” for the Teatro x la Identidad Series, “Legión Re-ligión, Las 13 Oraciones”, and “La posínada”. About a month ago, on the program It Would Be Incredible, on the Olga streaming channel, Tortonese read the author’s legendary (or infamous?) poem, “Shadow of Shells.”
“Madness is being able to see beyond.” In 2002 she won a Martín Fierro award for her performance in “Tumberos”. At that time he had a psychiatric episode that led to him being hospitalized. “I laugh at that hospitalization. There I learned what a bunch of scoundrels psychiatrists and psychologists are. They are the police of the soul: they try to fit everyone into a model of life and censor poetry. Madness can also be lucid, it can be a person’s path of knowledge and lead to interesting places. In fact, the asylums are full of lucid people, so lucid that they know more than those who go through life asleep, take the taxi, go to the cafecito, hang out with their wives, have children and educate them,” he told Salí about that. episode.
Urdapilleta died at the age of 59, on Sunday night, December 1, 2013, due to stomach cancer that he had recently suffered from. In December 2023, within the framework of the sixth edition of the Queer Art Festival, the queer cultural center Casa Brandon presented “Urdapilleta y sus glorias”, a tribute that featured readings of her texts by actors such as Cecilia Roth, Verónica Llinás , Alejandra Fletchner and Rita Cortese (the latter was a neighbor and friend of Urdapilleta) and the poet Fernando Noy.
“I’m not an actor: I don’t want to receive awards, I don’t want to be known, I don’t want to be seen. I walk invisible on the street, I convince myself that no one knows me. Suddenly I see a face of a person who looks at me, smiles at me and grabs me like paranoia and I say to myself: what the hell is that person laughing at… I hate fame, it’s a current evil. There are many people who want to be an actor to be famous. And fame is of no use. Theater is an art. I am an actor only on stage; Below I am a person like any other. And I want to be. It doesn’t work out for me, but I want to,” he once declared in an interview.
He failed to be normal. He only managed to be the creature that even today, from archive videos and reels, continues to be disturbing.
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