María de los Ángeles López Segovia was a woman who was born in Madrid on March 20, 1936 and died in the same city on August 19, 2015. One day, when she was barely twenty years old, she decided to become Lina Morgan, and … With this name that woman became immortal. Few Spanish artists have had their significance, their popularity and have left such a deep mark on our stages and our television. Good proof of this is the documentary series ‘Lina‘, directed by Israel of the Holy, and which premieres today on Movistar Plus+. About fifty figures who knew her, treated her or simply admired her parade before her cameras, such as José Sacristán, Eduardo Navarrete, Albert Boadella, Bárbara Rey, Jesús Cimarro, Lluís Pasqual, Lolita, Manolo Zarzo, Mónica Pont, Paco Mir , Father Ángel or Rosa Belmonte. In addition, eighteen performers pay a particular tribute to her by recreating some of the scenes in which she starred throughout her career: Silvia Abril, Goizalde Núñez, José Mota, Manuela Velasco, Pepa Rus, Pepe Viyuela and Anabel Alonso are several of these artists. «’Lina’ -says the director of the documentary, divided into three chapters- is the story of the dancer in the back row whom no one could stop looking at. “It is not easy to make people laugh, and even more so to do it every afternoon, at a quarter past nine and on the stage of a theater.”
That theater was, for many years, the La Latina Theater, located in one of the most traditional neighborhoods in Madrid. Very close to that theater, at number 4 Don Pedro Street, Lina Morgan was born. As a child she played with José Luis, the youngest of the five brothers (she was the fourth), around that theater, which had been a cinema during the years of the Civil War and where after her theater shows began to be performed. magazine. “When we played at her doors, with an overflowing childish fantasy, she told him: one day this theater will be ours.” And she was. In 1978 he rented it to its then owner, Matias Colsada, and five years later he bought it, together with his brother José Luis, for 127 million pesetas. The theater, on whose stage she had gone on when she was only 16 years old, and which she had fantasized about as a child, was hers.
Lina Morgan, Israel del Santo continues, “was short, with short legs and rather ugly. No one would say that this little girl could compete with the great stars who starred in the magazines and filled the theaters of the 50s and 60s. But she had something, a gift, that those super-stars did not have; she knew how to make people laugh».
Laughter and buses
“Make people laugh” is an expression that actually falls short in the case of Lina Morgan. She caused bursts of laughter when she turned her mouth to draw an impossible grimace, turned her gaze or her clubbing legs at an angle and turned them into two rubber limbs. “You saw the people’s faces looking at Lina and it was true devotion,” he says. José Sacristan in the documentary. ‘What a pair of twins!’ (1980-1983), ‘You have to say yes to love’ (1983-1984), ‘Yes to love!’ (1985-1987), ‘The Last Tram’ (1987-1991) and ‘Celeste… no es un color’ (1991-1993) were the titles in which she starred in her Teatro de La Latina; All of them were phenomena of our scene, and every day at the door of the theater you could see buses coming from all over Spain to go to her shows. ‘What a pair of twins’, for example, raised 2,700 million pesetas (about 16 million euros) during the three years that the work was on display.
«There are sectors, I don’t know whether to call them intellectuals – he complained on one occasion – that accuse me of exercising populism, as if it were something negative. “It seems like I have to apologize for coming from all over Spain to see me.” And in all those magazines, his constant refrain: «Grateful and excited, I can only say: thank you for coming», the song that Gregorio García Segura and Manuel Santos composed for her in 1975, and which she turned into her anthem, with a phrase that has transcended the stage and is now part of popular language.
But the success multiplied with the television broadcast of their magazines. On January 11, 1988, the broadcast on La 1 of ‘Yes to Love’, recorded at the Teatro de La Latina itself, was seen by 17 and a half million viewers and exceeded 84 percent of the audience. ‘What a pair of twins’, on December 27, 1983, was followed by 19.7 million viewers, with an acceptance rate of 8.8 percent.
Lina Morgan’s name was synonymous with audiences and when the directors of RTVE wanted to improve theirs, they programmed one of their magazines. On January 1, 1990, ‘The Last Streetcar’ was broadcast, watched by 6.5 million viewers (72 percent of the audience); At Christmas 1993, ‘Celeste no es un color’ attracted 9.5 million viewers (61 percent audience share); The regional and private chains already existed then. In 1995, ‘La noche de Lina’, a special Christmas program produced by Valerio Lazarovhad a 54% screen share and attracted 8 million viewers.
‘Royal Manzanares Hostel’
But the biggest television phenomenon starring Lina Morgan was yet to come: the series ‘Hostal Royal Manzanares‘, also produced by Valerio Lazarov, and which was broadcast from February 1996 to Christmas 1997. That day, the final episode was broadcast, which attracted 7.33 million viewers. The most watched broadcast of the series was on May 15, 1996, with 8.67 million viewers and a screen share of 50.6 percent (this year’s Champions League final between Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund was viewed by 6.85 million people (54.1 percent of the audience).
«Success is my gasolineWithout success you couldn’t live – said Lina Morgan -. And fame for me is fantastic, it doesn’t cost me any sacrifice. I don’t want to wear glasses and a scarf so that people don’t recognize me on the street. If I have fought for forty years for fame, traveling up and down Spain a thousand times, how can I give it up? Not even nine years after her death.
