Leonardo Favio

Leonardo Favio, born Fuad Jorge Jury Olivera on May 28, 1938, in Las Catitas, Mendoza, was an Argentine singer, actor and film director who moved from a troubled childhood and minor acting roles to become a central figure in Latin American popular culture. He spent his youth in poverty between Las Catitas and Luján de Cuyo, then moved to Buenos Aires in the late 1950s, where he worked as a film extra and, under the mentorship of director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, acted in titles such as El secuestrador (1958) and Fin de fiesta (1960). His directing career began with the short El amigo (1960) and reached full length with Crónica de un niño solo (1965), followed by Este es el romance del Aniceto y la Francisca… (1967) and El dependiente (1969), a trio of films that critics later ranked among the most important in Argentine cinema and that earned him national awards such as the Silver Condor for Best Film. At the end of the 1960s he turned decisively to music, releasing his debut album Fuiste mía un verano in November 1968; the record, issued by CBS, included ballads like "Fuiste mía un verano", "O quizás simplemente le regale una rosa", "Ella… ella ya me olvidó", "Quiero aprender de memoria" and his version of "Para saber cómo es la soledad", and its songs also served as the soundtrack to the 1969 film of the same name in which he starred. Through the early 1970s he alternated recording albums such as Leonardo Favio (1969), Hola, che (1970), El talento de Leonardo Favio (1971), Favio 73 (1973) and Era… cómo podría explicar… (1974) with large-scale films like Juan Moreira (1973) and Nazareno Cruz y el lobo (1975), the latter becoming the most-watched film in Argentine history and consolidating his status as a popular auteur closely linked to Peronist politics. After directing Soñar, soñar (1976), the military coup and the ensuing dictatorship forced him into exile in Mexico and then Colombia, where he spent the late 1970s and early 1980s living mainly from his music and touring Latin America. He returned to Argentina in 1987 and resumed filmmaking with the biopic Gatica, el mono (1993), which won the Silver Condor for Best Film and was chosen as Argentina’s submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, while he also continued to perform his classic ballads in concert. Between 1996 and 1999 he directed the nearly six-hour documentary Perón, sinfonía del sentimiento, a large-scale personal portrait of Juan Domingo Perón and the history of Peronism, and in 2008 he released Aniceto, a dance-based musical reimagining of his 1967 film that he considered his most complete work and that was widely praised in Argentina. Leonardo Favio died in Buenos Aires on November 5, 2012, at the age of 74, from complications related to chronic hepatitis C and pneumonia, leaving a dual legacy as one of Argentina’s most beloved romantic singers and one of its most acclaimed film directors.

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