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Sara García
García in the 1937 film No basta ser madre
Born	Sara García Hidalgo[1] (1895-09-08)8 September 1895[2] Orizaba, Veracruz, Mexico[2]
Died	21 November 1980(1980-11-21) (aged 85)[1] Mexico City, Mexico
Resting place	Panteón Español Mexico City
Other names	La Abuelita de México[3]
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1917–1980
Spouse(s)	Fernando Ibáñez (m. 1918–1923)
Children	1

Sara García Hidalgo (8 September 1895^[2] – 21 November 1980) was a Mexican actress who made her biggest mark during the "Golden Age of Mexican cinema".^[4] During the 1940s and 1950s, she often played the part of a no-nonsense but lovable grandmother in numerous Mexican films. In later years, she played parts in Mexican telenovelas.

García was baptized and is remembered as La Abuelita de México ("Mexico's Grandmother").^[3]

Life and career

1895–1917: Childhood

House where García was born at Orizaba, Veracruz

Sara García Hidalgo was born on 8 September 1985 at Orizaba Veracruz.^[1][5] Her parents were Andalusian, Isidoro García Ruiz, an architect, and his wife Felipa Hidalgo de Ruiz in 1895.^[2] Her father was hired for various jobs in Veracruz, where they arrived, having just come from Havana, Cuba.^[5] Sarita was the only survivor of their eleven children.^[6]

In 1900, a storm caused the Santa Catarina river (which separated the family house from Sara's school) to overflow and knock down the bridge that crossed it. Until the evening the children of the school could return from the other side of the river.^[2] The anguish of Don Isidoro for believing that he would lose his only daughter caused him to suffer a stroke days later. Doña Felipa decided to sell her business a papier-mâché factory and travel to Mexico City to intern her husband into the Sociedad de Beneficencia Española de México (Spanish Welfare Society of Mexico), but he died shortly after arriving.^[2][5] However her mother was contracted as the housekeeper.^[5]

At age 9, Sara entered the prestigious Las Vizcaínas school as an intern.^[2][5] In 1905 a typhus epidemic invaded Mexico, Sara became infected and infected her mother Felipa, who passed away.^[2][5] She remained under the charge of the director of the institution, Cecilia Mallet,^[2] and her good behavior and excellent grades allowed García to stayed in school. The director of Las Vizcaínas noticed her great sensitivity and artistic inclination and directed her into painting.^[5] She also became a teacher and during her class she used to make her students performed plays.^[2]

1917: Film debut in silent films

Sara started her film career at age 22 when she was still a teacher.^[2] One day she decided to wander the Alameda and discovered the newly founded Azteca Films studios.^[5] She came in with curiosity and was fascinated by everything she saw. From that moment she thought that she could also act, even if it was in the theater.^[5] One day, watching Mimi Derba filming, the first Mexican film diva, an actor and official of Azteca Films caught her curiosity and invited her to participate in what would be her first film En defensa Propia "In self-defense" (1917).^[5] Then she went to the theater where she started making small roles.^[5] Her diction and voice gave her prestige and she became part of the most outstanding companies of the moment: Mercedes Navarro, Prudencia Grifell and the sisters Anita and Isabelita Blanch.^[5] In one of her tours throughout the Mexican Republic, she met Fernando Ibáñez, whom she had seen during the filming of "La soñadora" (1917).^[5]

1918–1947: Golden Age of Mexican cinema and La Abuelita de México

In 1918, she married Fernando Ibáñez^[2] and traveled throughout the country and Central America, until at a stop in Tepic, she gave birth to a girl, whom they named Fernanda Mercedes Ibáñez García.^[5] Sara had to dedicate time and take care of her daughter. Her absence bothered Fernando, who began to get involved in several adventures, then became entangled with the head of the company.^[5] Sara divorced from her husband and left with her daughter.^[5] Years later her ex-husband returned home sick. Sara paid for her expenses and cared for him until his death in 1932.^[5] Established firmly in the theater, she began to be called to work in the cinema. Her daughter Fernanda also ventured into the cinema with the movie "La madrina del diablo" (1937) in which she played as Jorge Negrete's girlfriend.^[5] Outside the sets, she courted her with Sara's disavowal. The romance ended abruptly and Fernanda married the following year (1938) with the engineer Mariano Velasco Mújica, leaving to live in Ciudad Valles, Tamaulipas.^[5] Little more than two years Fernanda became ill with typhoid fever and died on October 17, 1940. Due to her strong personality Sara survived her daughter 40 years.^[5]

García under her grandma persona in the film La abuelita (1942)

Sara García with fellow co-star Joaquín Pardavé in El barchante Neguib (1946). Both actors also portrayed Lebanese-immigrants to Mexico in the earlier El baisano Jalil (1942)

García would later continued with her extensive career in film and sacrificed her beauty when she decided, at the age of 30, to take her teeth so that her mouth looked like that of an older woman and thus be able to star in roles of self-sacrificing ladies and achieve personify the role they gave her.^[6]

Film actress Emma Roldán suggested Sara García for the role of doña Panchita, an old woman, in the 1940 film Allá en el trópico ("There in the Tropics").^[5] The film's director Fernando de Fuentes considered that García was too young for the part (indeed she was in her mid 40s) but Roldán replied him saying "Sara is an actress, and actresses don't have an age".^[5] For the screen test, Sara García had a wig made for her. At the time of the screen test, the director asked the crew of her whereabouts and they answered that she was the woman in front of him, the director was shocked: her wig, lack of teeth, and performance had touched him.^[5] It is in Fernando de Fuentes' Allá en el trópico where Sara García won her title of la Abuelita de México (Mexico's Grandmother).^[5]

In 1942, Sara García co-starred with Joaquín Pardavé in El baisano Jalil, a comedy film where she portrayed the wife of a Lebanese-immigrant family, one of the marginalized communities settled in the La Lagunilla neighborhood, when they arrived in Mexico City.^[7] She starred again with Pardavé in a similar comedy, El barchante Neguib (1945).^[7]

She started a long series of films co-starring with the brightest stars of the cinema of Mexico, such as Cantinflas, Jorge Negrete, Germán Valdés "Tin-Tan".^[8]

She co-starred many times in films as the grandmother of famous Mexican actor Pedro Infante. Her most remembered film with him is in the 1947 one Los tres García also starred alongside with Abel Salazar and Víctor Manuel Mendoza, where she incarnate the character of their grandmother with a strong, naughty and authoritarian attitude.^[9][10]

1947–1980: Multiple films, Telenovelas and final works

García continued working with Pardave and appeared with him on El ropavejero "The junkman" (1947) and in Azahares para tu boda "Azahares for your wedding" (1950), which were her last jobs with him.^[11] Garcia's nature was also deeply irreverent, and she showed it in films like Doña Clarines (1951), in which she makes fun of her grandmother's character, something she repeated in Las señoritas Vivanco "The Misses Vivanco" (1959) and in El proceso de las señoritas Vivanco "The process of the Misses Vivanco" (1961), both in which she acted along with Prudencia Grifell and were directed by Mauricio de la Serna.^[11]

In that decade he combined his work between film and television, appearing in multiple soap operas such as A Face in the Past (1960), La gloria Quedo atrás (1962), La Duchess (1966), in which a lottery ticket seller he wins the jackpot and uses that money to get his daughter back, who gave his in-laws millionaires in the past.

In that decade we also saw her in the pages of a comic-book adventure story entitled Doña Sara, the mere, mere, in which she imitated the garb of Los tres García and Vuelven los García. In the 70s, her grandmother's character was taken up in films such as Fin de fiesta (1972), by Mauricio Walerstein, and Luis Alcoriza's "Mecánica Nacional" (1972), in which she vociferates some of the most famous majaderías of our ciematography , but that had their charm to emanate from that mouth that had represented so much for the moral society of Mexico.

In the 70s she appeared as Nana Tomasita, who looked after Cristina (Graciela Mauri) in the long-running telenovela Mundo de juguete (1974) and as a meticulous old woman from the Caridad segment, directed by Jorge Fons, in Faith, Hope and Charity.

Personal life

During her tenure on the College of Las Vizcaínas, she met Rosario González Cuenca, the daughter of a marriage that his parents knew on the ship that traveled from Cuba to Mexico. Years after their meeting, both of them reunited after García's divorced to Fernando Ibañez, Rosario at the moment also divorced and both went to reside together, with Rosario becoming in Fernanda's aunt who was Sara García's daughter.^[5] Rosario would later became her alleged female lover, assistant, and business manager, and García lived throughout her life with her.^[12]

She adored Pedro Infante, otherwise she couldn't stand Jorge Negrete as he fell in love with her daughter Fernanda.^[6] Many close friends affirm that she was a severe and evil mother-in-law as well as not consenting the relationship between Jorge and her daughter.^[6]

Later years and death

García had her own television show in 1951, Media hora con Abuelita,^[13] but it was a failure and subsequently was cancelled.^[4] She returned to television in 1960 when she obtained a role in Un rostro en el pasado^[14] which was her first of eight telenovelas that also included Mundo de juguete in 1974, which as of this date (early 2006) the longest-running telenovela in history,^[15] and Viviana with Lucía Méndez in 1978.^[16]

On 21 November 1980, Sara died at the National Medical Center in Mexico City at the age of 85, due to a cardiac arrest that arose from pneumonia, days before she had been hospitalized after being injured by falling down the stairs of her house.^[17]

García was buried alongside her daughter in a mausoleum at Panteón Español cemetery in Mexico City.^[18] While she was being buried, the song "Mi Cariñito" ("My Little Darling/Beloved One") was played as this song was the one that Pedro Infante sang it to Sara several times, particularly he sang it drunk and tearful as a lament after Sara died in the movie Vuelven Los Garcia (The Garcias Return).^[19] It is claimed that the song was sung at her funeral by Lucha Villa.^[2]

Legacy

In 1973, Sara García signed a commercial agreement to give her image to the factory of Chocolates Azteca, which was later bought by the Nestlé brand.^[20] Since then her image is displayed on the label of Mexico's traditional Abuelita chocolate.^[21]

Filmography

Telenovelas

Television shows

Documentaries

Films

Cinema of Mexico

Sara García in La abuelita (1942)

Sara in El barchante Neguib (1946)

Cinema of the United States

García along with Liliane Montevecchi in The Living Idol (1957)

Cinema of Italy

Cinema of Spain

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Sara García

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Sara García.

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  Sara García on IMDb


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  Sara García at the Cinema of Mexico site of the ITESM (in Spanish)
  


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  Sara García at Find a Grave