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Marga López: 100 YEARS

Rafael Aviña

A naïve sinner who remains a virgin in spirit while dancing with the customers of the famous Salón México. A self-sacrificing wife who suffers the tragedy of her son along with her husband Pedro Infante in Un rincón cerca del cielo. A sensual quinceañera as provocative as Lolita in Las colegialas. An indecisive Americanized blonde girl who keeps three macho cousins in check in Los tres García. A proud daughter who rivals her mother in Soledad. A cabaret performer pursued by a cruel stepfather in Callejera. An eternal spinster who waits uselessly in Azahares for your wedding, or who suffers in silence with an unlucky artist husband in a rooftop room in Nonoalco in Del brazo y por la calle. These are the dozens of faces of a beautiful, lucid, and coherent actress born a hundred years ago. She was a great protagonist of an underrated genre: the melodrama, in which Marga López was able to build a niche at the height of her charisma.

She was born on June 21, 1924, in Tucumán, Argentina. Margarita López Ramos, better known as Marga López, entered the artistic scene as part of the family musical group "Los Hermanitos López" with which she toured Latin America until she arrived in Mexico, a country that dazzled her so much that it would end up helping her to consolidate one of the greatest film careers in the golden age of Mexican cinema. She met her first husband in Mexico, businessman Carlos Amador, and also the man who would become the love of her life: Arturo de Córdova.

After alternating with the little sisters Anita and Isabel Blanch in the theater, Marga made her film debut in El hijo desobediente (1945), the first starring role of the brilliant Germán Valdés TinTan. Here, she played a stubborn waitress who deals with that strange pachuco who gets drunk and insists on singing like Jorge Negrete, in addition to refusing to pay the bill. Marga worked so hard that Tin Tan himself cast her as his co-star a year later in Con la música por dentro (1946).

In just the first five years, Marga appeared in 24 films portraying all kinds of roles: from the fussy student in Las colegialas, the heroine rescued by Luis Aguilar in El último chinaco, or the reckless and love-struck cousin in Los tres García and Vuelven los García alongside Sara García, Pedro Infante, Víctor Manuel Mendoza, and Abel Salazar. Her interaction with Infante was so effective that she soon starred with him in Cartas mercadas. Her attractive physical presence (beautiful big eyes, well-delineated eyebrows, sensual lips, split chin) and at the same time, her tender and vulnerable appearance allowed her unique adaptability to embody the object of the vilest desire and at the same time, remain pure in the face of the evil of the world and this is how Emilio Indio Fernández understood it in Salón México (1948) with Rodolfo Acosta as her brutal exploiter and the good cruiser policeman Miguel Inclán. Gabriel Figueroa's camera fell in love with an actress who was proud of her own misfortunes; a woman with a trembling voice of uncontainable tears, her braids adorned with humble bows, and her big eyes, split chin, and bleeding lips.

Indeed, one of the main axes on which Mexican cinematography rested was the melodrama where the prostitute and the self-sacrificing mother align. The one who suffers all kinds of humiliations to support her children, as happens to Marga in Corona de lágrimas (1967). The family represented the sacred institution that protects its members from the onslaught of the outside world through masochism that prevented Marga López's wedding in Azahares para tu boda (1950). In Soledad, she plays the daughter who is unaware of her relationship with Libertad Lamarque: her mother, a former servant who secretly marries her employer, who later reveals to her that it has all been a farce. On the other hand, in Un rincón cerca del cielo and Ahora soy rico (1952) she suffers alongside Infante, wealth, poverty, and motherhood. Del brazo y por la calle, Casa de muñecas, Una mujer de la calle , and later films of unusual maturity such as Nazarín, Tiempo de morir, Hasta el viento tiene miedo or El libro de piedra, are proof of the versatility of an actress like Marga López, who made suffering on the screen one of the most dignified and attractive professions.