A few years ago an advertisement showed a man rolling on a 5-a-side soccer field on synthetic grass. He was clutching his leg and screaming as he rolled over on the ground. A voice sealed the moment saying “it has something of Norma Aleandro”. Not much more explanation was needed. The name of the actress, long before her consecration with The official story which brought Argentina its first Oscar award, became synonymous with theater, film and television. However, his art has no borders and goes beyond disciplines and formats.
His performances are famous in The official story, The son of the bride, Anita, a hundred times I shouldn’t and Truce on the big screen; as in the tables with Master Class, Scenes of conjugal life, Long day trip into the night and his participations in TV in Juged thing, In therapy, Final time, The rich don’t ask permission. At 88 years old, regarding his birthday which he celebrated on May 2, Teleshow Visit some of the most fascinating moments of the Argentine icon.
Norma Aleandro’s library has several books of her own authorship. Poems and stories of Aténazor, The kids want to enter: in an act, with music and four generations on stage, Secret Diary, distant ports and Of rigorous etiquette and other works. But during the pandemic his passion for the writer mutated and ended in Cloud standarda podcast and YouTube series from Film & Arts where he reads his own stories from the living room of his house.
“I have published a little pushed… What is true is that I like to write and I like to draw. Among others, Emecé and Sudamericana edited my first poems and stories, a bit against the grain of my desire. I never promoted them, I always kept them out of the theater. It is true that Mario Vargas Llosa gave me the prologue with humor because he liked it a lot. I have published a lot, but few people have found out, only people who buy books. I have not made any fuss, I would like it to stay in a corner,” he modestly stated in July 2020 to Infobae Culture.
“I started writing before I was 10 years old, my parents (María Luisa Robledo and Pedro Aleandro), who were actors, were in Chile, I wrote little things and sent them to them. One day they published it in a Chilean literature magazine. My parents were happy, but I didn’t even realize it. I remember a tragic poem, because for me the fact that they were away for so long was tragic, but I don’t remember anything else. Writing does so much good, it doesn’t matter if you publish or not. It doesn’t matter if one is good or bad,” he reflected.
It was her grandson, Iván Ferrigno, who convinced her to give a new body, this time on the web, to her writings. “It is a very strange cloud. Things that you only think happen to you have happened to me over time. The more years you live, the more friends, family, people you love, disappear. It remains in the imagination, in the memory, but they disappear. It’s not that I live with that on my shoulders, but when you write something much deeper begins to come out of what you carry on your shoulders,” she elaborated.
Her favorite story is called “With the Blouse Inside Out,” she wrote it during her four-year exile in Spain. “I put my blouse on inside out and left it that way. I gave myself the reason that when you put something inside out you receive a gift, but in reality I haven’t had the desire to take it off and turn it around.”
“God bless you”said Norma Aleandro, excited, on March 24, 1986 when The Official Story, directed by Luis Puenzo and in which she herself acted, won the Oscar award for Best Foreign Language Film at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion del Music Center.
However, a less well-known moment is the award for best female performance that was won at the Cannes festival for the same film and which it won, in an ex aequo triumph, with no less than Cher. The singer tied with our representative for Maskthe film based on a real case in which she plays the mother of a young man who has craniodiaphyseal dysplasia.
With the most lush and eighties hair, holding hands, the American diva and the actress, who played a history teacher, discovers that her adopted daughter is the daughter of missing people, hugged on stage to celebrate their triumph.
Hollywood was never a desired destination for Norma Aleandro, even though she participated in two films (Gaby: a true storyfrom 1987, The taste of infidelityfrom 1989 and One year, one life, 1990). “I rejected two films: one is called All the Pretty Horseswith Leonardo Dicaprio and production of Columbia Pictures. But I don’t feel like leaving. Nothing more than that. The other film is ‘Fabiola’, by the author Eduardo Machado – highly regarded in the United States – who, when I was in New York with ‘La Señorita de Tacna’, wanted me to do one of his works, but I told him no, because to do theater You have to stay for at least six or eight months,” he told La Nación in 1998.
“Since 1991 I haven’t been there, they have continued to call me and I systematically say no. Lino Patalano always remembers the time when a fax arrived from Francis Ford Coppola – because the faxes arrived at Maipo – at the time when he was making Scenes of conjugal life, with Alcón. Lino told me: ‘But, Norma, do you know who Coppola is? If you want to go, we will stop the work and then we will restart it.’ I could not go. That was it,” he said.
“It was a long and varied adventure, but before the television movie ‘One Man’s War’, with Anthony Hopkins, I had already decided that it would be the last. Why would I go and make these films now? There were times when due to great financial difficulties I had to leave and I have earned there for a film what I would not earn here in 70, but I think that when you discover where your heart is you have to stay there,” he was honest.
I confess that I paint It is called the book that Norma edited in 2020 where she shows, for the first time, a facet unknown to the general public. “I like to write as I like to draw, but I don’t like to make a profession of that. I already have a profession that is quite demanding, that of an actress, so I don’t feel like being required to do anything, neither writing nor drawing. I have done it for pleasure since I was a girl and over time I was looking for ways: suddenly it was pointillism and I fell in love with that technique. I searched on my own because I realized that it was fun and I put together the shadows calmly,” she told Infobae Cultura in September 2020 along with some of the work she did for two years.
“I do this for fun, it’s a real hobby and I don’t like to compete with anyone, or be judged or put above or below, I say it in the book. For me, drawing is fun that finally came out and the people who have the book liked it, but I don’t plan to make this a profession,” she said. “I start, in general, by an eye. I draw an eye and from there it starts to happen, let’s see who comes… Another big eye that looks where? up? AHA! What is upstairs? There could be a man, another lady, there could be a house, a cat, anything,” the actress said.
“What amuses me is not knowing what is going to come. I tell you ‘what’s going to come’ because I really don’t think about it. That’s what amuses me. And it’s something that rests me. I do meditation, I like it because it does me good, and this is like a meditation. I have fun, I fly anywhere and above all I don’t worry about the drawings being great or competing with the people I admire as draftsmen or painters, not at all. So I have a lot of fun,” she confided.
A simple search through TikTok and Instagram yields Norma Aleandro’s viral moments. Her talent today is appreciated by new generations who rediscover her in short videos in memorable scenes of The son of the bridethe film by Juan José Campanella where she plays the mother of Ricardo Darín, a woman who has Alzheimer’s disease, as in Cleopatra together with Natalia Oreiro or in Anita by Marcos Carnevale.
A little-known moment in the actress’s career was recovered by Los Nocheros fans. Norma and Alfredo Alcón, with whom she was married and shared a very long friendship later, shared the video clip of “Canción del adiós” by the band from Salta. There, as they had done so many times, the actors interpret a love story in a rural area where the death of one of the lovers occurs. Today, a fragment of the video on the social network that the little ones use the most, adds likes and comments 25 years after its launch
The playbackyes, lip sync or phonomimics are part of the usual dynamics that abound on the networks. People dramatize scenes from Waiting for the Float, from Married with Children, from news clips, from Big Brother. Norma also has its viral ones: there appears, for example, a drag queen named Pablo Atkinson performing a parody of a hilarious scene from One Hundred Times I Don’t Owe. One more example of the enduring strength of Norma Aleandro.
