An Argentine Actress’ True, Official Story

For Norma Aleandro, the decision to learn English was made during the Cannes Film Festival two years ago.

The Argentine actress, lauded on three continents for her remarkable performance in “The Official Story,” was having lunch at the Hotel Majestic before receiving her (shared) Best Actress award. Seated a few tables away was Dirk Bogarde, the British actor.

“I loved his work so much,” said Aleandro in Los Angeles the other day. “I learned such a lot from watching him in movies. And I wanted to tell him so. But I could not.

“I told my interpreter: ‘How I wish I could speak to him.’ So when Bogarde rose to leave, the interpreter said: ‘She wants you to know how much she admires your work.’ Bogarde said: ‘Thank you very much,’ and moved on. And I said to my interpreter, ‘This is ridiculous. As soon as I get home I start learning English.’

“So really, ‘Gaby . . . ‘ and my sitting here with you is all due to Dirk Bogarde.”

“Gaby: A True Story,” opening this week, is Aleandro’s first English-speaking film. The New York Times has called her performance in this movie “Superb . . . a real stand-out. . . . “ She herself has great hopes for it.

“After ‘The Official Story’ I was offered quite a few roles in American movies, even though I did not speak the language then,” she said. “But the first one that interested me was ‘Gaby.’ Movies are not my whole life, you see”--here she laughed throatily--”First comes my family. Then the theater. After that, movies. So I am careful what I accept.”

“Gaby: A True Story,” also starring Liv Ullmann, Robert Loggia and Rachel Levin, is the story of a child born with cerebral palsy who, through the care and understanding of her nurse Florencia, grows up to become a well-known poet and writer in Mexico.

Based on the life of Gabriela Brimmer, born in Mexico of European parents, it is directed by Luis Mandoki. Aleandro plays Florencia, the Indian peasant woman who reared the child; Levin is Gaby.

“I had the script six months in advance because I wanted to make sure I understood everything,” said Aleandro. “To be convincing as Florencia I knew I had to think in English, too.

“So I spent five hours a day studying the script and five hours a day with my language teacher. The evenings I spent speaking English with my husband (psychiatrist Eduardo Le Poole), who speaks it fluently.”

Aleandro went to Mexico one month ahead of shooting to study the women of the village where the real Florencia comes from.

“She is very dark,” said Aleandro, “so every day for three months I took sun, something I never do normally. Even when we were shooting I lay in the sun for one hour during lunch. I had to get that dark Indian look.”

Aleandro had never been to Mexico before. But she is no stranger to the United States.

She came here with her one-woman show, “Love and Other Stories About Love,” and has twice appeared in her highly successful play, “The Lady of Tacna,” which was written especially for her by Mario Vargas Llosa. In it she plays a 90-year-old woman recounting tales of her youth.

“A magic play,” she said. “One moment I am 90, dreaming of my youth, the next I am 20, dancing around. I do it without makeup.”

Next week she will stage the play in Mar del Plata in Argentina.

Widely hailed as Argentina’s first lady of films and theater, 46-year-old Aleandro now enjoys the kind of courtesy and attention that five years ago would have been unthinkable.

Three months after a military coup put the junta in power in 1976, she found herself in trouble for speaking out on human rights. Her theater was tear-gassed, a bomb was detonated in the lobby of her apartment and she received telephone threats warning her to get out of the country.

Together with her husband and son, Oscar, she fled, first to Uruguay, then to Spain. She didn’t return to Argentina until 1981--to find herself a non-person. Newspapers, radio and TV were afraid to even mention her name.

“That year I opened in ‘The Lady of Tacna,’ ” she said, “and I won an important theatrical prize. But because the newspapers and radio were forbidden to mention my name, nobody knew about it. At the reception for the award the TV cameras faced the other way. Incredible, huh? But I understood. The junta was still in power. It was dangerous to mention me.

“But all that is behind me now. I do not look back. Now we are a democracy (the junta fell in 1983) and the movie business is growing day by day. ‘The Official Story’ (directed by Luis Puenzo) opened many markets for us. We have good young directors and technicians and, by American standards, we can make movies cheaply. ‘The Official Story’ cost just $600,000, you know. And that was an expensive movie for us.”

Aleandro now has a Hollywood agent and is reading a couple of scripts.

“But I will wait to see how ‘Gaby’ is received before making any decisions,” she said. “I am not looking for a Hollywood career. Only if there is something I really like do I want to come here.”

She does not discuss her problems with her husband, she says, nor he with her.

“He is a psychiatrist,” she said, “but he does not want me for a patient. But I do practice my English on him. He speaks beautifully Brrritish English”--she rolled her r’s. “He had a Dutch father and a Russian mother but English was always their first language. So often he has to correct me. ‘It isn’t twenny ,’ he says, ‘it’s twenty .’ ” She laughed again. “I’m learning.”