Prolific Argentine actor Pepe Soriano dies at 93

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Argentine actor José "Pepe" Soriano, a prolific performer on stage and film in Argentina and Spain, died on Wednesday at age 93.

Soriano, who retired just two years ago after a career spanning seven decades, received international awards as recently as 2021 for his role in Gonzalo Calzada's psychological thriller “Nocturnal” - for which he earned a Best Actor nod in that year's Screamfest.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1929 to a Jewish family, Soriano left law school to join the theater in 1950. Success eluded the young actor until 1968, when he was cast as the lead in Juan José Jusid's production of Roberto Cossa's tragedy, Tute Cabrero, and in Raúl de la Torre's character study, “Mr. and Mrs. Juan Lamaglia” in 1970.

But it was his portrayal of Schultz, a German labor organizer, in Osvaldo Bayer's “Rebellion in Patagonia” in 1974 that gave him his most memorable film role.

The depiction of the brutal repression of a 1920-22 sheep ranch workers' strike resulted in serious problems for those involved in the film - including Soriano, who left for Spain shortly after a fascist military coup in 1976.

Amid an easing of repression by the dictatorship, Soriano returned in 1979. That year, he reprised his best-known stage role on film: that of a senile but ravenous grandmother in Roberto Cossa's tragicomic La nona - which in some ways mirrored the country's sudden foreign debt crisis, with its ever-growing interest obligations.

Soriano's role in “Another Hope” in 1984, a dystopian film set in a factory where energy is generated from human bodies, was likewise a timely metaphor for the targeting of union members during the 1976-83 regime. He then portrayed the late reformist Senator Lisandro de la Torre in Juan José Jusid's “An Assassination in the Senate” - a historical drama based on de la Torre's 1935 attempted murder.

Among his better-known later roles were that of a dying idealist determined to stop the sale of a historic Uruguayan steam locomotive in Diego Arsuaga's “The Last Train” (2002), and as an elderly and struggling Argentine immigrant in New York in Rodrigo Fürth's “Through Your Eyes” (2006).

At: https://euro.eseuro.com/news/1014977.html

Prolific Argentine actor and playwright Pepe Soriano, 1929-2023.

Soriano was equally at home on stage as on film. “Cinema is the great medium. It is really the possibility of showing work for posterity,” he noted recently.

“Theater is like water in your hands: It begins and ends, and remains, in memory. Cinema, on the other hand, rescues (memories) from the greats.”