Silvia Pinal dies; Mexican actress starred in acclaimed surrealist films
She appeared in more than 100 movies and television shows, including Luis Buñuel’s 1961 masterwork “Viridiana.”
Ms. Pinal had recently been hospitalized with a urinary tract infection. Her death was confirmed in statements by the media company TelevisaUnivision, which broadcast some of her television shows, and by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who wrote in a tribute that Ms. Pinal’s “film and theatrical talent is part of Mexico’s cultural memory.”
A versatile actress who appeared in more than 100 movies and TV shows, Ms. Pinal played women who were by turns haughty, idealistic, prim and seductive. Beginning in the early 1950s, she performed opposite leading men including Pedro Infante and comic actors Cantinflas and Tin-Tan; won three competitive Ariel Awards, the Mexican equivalent to the Oscars; and captivated artists including muralist Diego Rivera, who painted her in a formfitting black dress, provocatively posed in front of a mirror.
Ms. Pinal later starred in telenovelas and went into politics, holding elected office in both houses of Mexico’s Congress. But to audiences in the United States and Europe she remained best known for her work with the Spanish-born Buñuel, a surrealist pioneer known for his mordant critiques of organized religion and bourgeois convention.
As Ms. Pinal told it, she was the one who sought to work with the director, rather than the other way around.
“I fell in love with his movies, his black humor, his way of being, and I knew that I would not rest until I was directed by him,” the newspaper El Universal quoted her as saying.
With her then-husband, businessman-turned-producer Gustavo Alatriste, Ms. Pinal traveled to Spain to track down Buñuel in his hometown of Calanda. She soon persuaded the director to cast her as the title character in his next movie, “Viridiana” (1961), which won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival even as it was banned by Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in Spain and denounced as blasphemous by the Vatican’s government-owned newspaper.
As Viridiana, Ms. Pinal played a young nun who visits her wealthy uncle (Fernando Rey) while preparing to take her final vows. The trip goes awry after he persuades Viridiana to don the wedding dress of his late wife, to whom she bears an uncanny resemblance, and then drugs her, taking her to bed but stopping short of assault. Overcome with shame, he hangs himself and leaves his estate to Viridiana, who turns it into a shelter for vagabonds and beggars.
Chaos ensues, including a notorious scene in which the mansion’s new inhabitants re-create Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” as their meal devolves into an orgy, to the tune of Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus. The movie ends with an implied ménage à trois, as Viridiana plays cards with her uncle’s illegitimate son (Francisco Rabal) and his mistress.
“‘Viridiana’ is an act of diabolical cleverness,” film critic Peter Howell wrote in the Toronto Star in 2006. “On the surface it’s a genuinely moving drama about a novice nun. … At the same time, barely hidden by implication and sleight of hand, the film calls into question the church’s commitment to forgiveness and tolerance, and the state’s ability to help the poor. And just in time for the social revolutions of the 1960s, the movie also mocks sexual repression.”
Hailed as a masterwork by critics, “Viridiana” tied for 52nd in Sight and Sound’s 2022 directors’ poll of the greatest films of all time. Ms. Pinal went on to collaborate with Buñuel in two more films, including “Simon of the Desert” (1965), a 45-minute satire in which she played the shape-shifting, breast-baring Devil himself, doing battle with a 5th-century saint living atop a pillar.
She also headed the ensemble cast in Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel” (1962), a surrealist black comedy about a group of wealthy dinner guests who find themselves unable to leave a party. As an aristocrat nicknamed Valkyrie, she played a pivotal role in the film, helping her fellow captives find their way out by re-creating events from the night they arrived.
The movie was adapted into an English-language opera and served as partial inspiration for Stephen Sondheim’s last musical, “Here We Are,” although many viewers — and Ms. Pinal herself — were perplexed by its meaning.
“To this day,” she said in a 2006 interview for the movie’s Criterion Collection DVD, “I don’t know what the film is about.”
By most accounts, Silvia Pinal Hidalgo was born in Guaymas, a port city in northwestern Mexico, on Sept. 12, 1931. Her mother worked at a restaurant and, according to El Universal, became pregnant with Ms. Pinal at age 15 from a relationship with an older orchestra conductor who worked at a Mexico City radio station. Her mother later married an army colonel and journalist who adopted Ms. Pinal as his daughter.
Ms. Pinal launched her acting career on the stage with backing from her first husband, Cuban-born actor and director Rafael Banquells, whom she married in 1947. Before long she was appearing in movies, with a starring role opposite Tin-Tan in the 1950 Mexican comedy “The King of the Neighborhood.” She later worked in Europe, starring in comedies such as 1959’s “Men and Noblemen,” alongside Italian actor-director Vittorio De Sica.
Although she mostly stayed away from Hollywood, in 1969 she starred with Burt Reynolds in the critically derided adventure movie “Shark!,” a “Jaws” precursor directed by Samuel Fuller.
Ms. Pinal gradually shifted from film to television and, in the aftermath of the deadly 1985 Mexico City earthquake, she launched “Mujer, Casos de la Vida Real” (“Woman, Real Life Cases”), an anthology series that ran for more than two decades. Produced and hosted by Ms. Pinal, the series dramatized the stories of quake victims and their families before evolving to explore issues including domestic violence and LGBT discrimination.
Ms. Pinal’s marriage to Banquells ended in divorce, as did her marriages to Alatriste, who produced each of the films she made with Buñuel; rock singer and actor Enrique Guzmán (she alleged that he was abusive during their marriage); and Tulio Hernández Gómez, the governor of Tlaxcala, who helped propel her political rise in the Institutional Revolutionary Party, better known by its Spanish acronym PRI.
A daughter from her second marriage, actress Viridiana Alatriste — named after Ms. Pinal’s breakthrough film — died in a car crash in 1982, at age 19.
In early 2000, Ms. Pinal fled to Miami amid allegations that she had defrauded a theater producers’ association. She denied wrongdoing and returned to Mexico that December, after an arrest warrant was dropped. “I’m back as I left,” she said, “with my name clean.”
Her career continued unabated. Ms. Pinal performed onstage and on TV while also making headlines as the matriarch of a show-business family, which grew to include a daughter from her first marriage, actress Sylvia Pasquel; two children from her third, singer Alejandra Guzmán and musician Luis Enrique Guzmán; and her granddaughter Frida Sofía, a model and singer.
Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
Looking back on “Viridiana,” Ms. Pinal said that programmers at Cannes were skeptical of the movie before they saw it, believing that Buñuel might have sold out to Franco’s regime because he had filmed in Spain. The director had escaped the notice of censors who failed to realize the script was parodying religious themes, not promoting them.
“They weren’t too interested,” she said in a Criterion interview, recalling the lead-up to the film festival premiere. “They thought, ‘What could Buñuel make in Spain under Franco, filming the life of a nun. It’s got to be a crummy film, full of compromises.’ And in fact, the film was shown the very last day, when everyone assumed the winners had already been chosen.”
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