Lifetime of high risks garners a high reward for Argentine actor

Left-wing guerrillas and right-wing Peronistas used a controversial Argentine film to blacklist Federico Luppi for eight years, but it didn’t prevent the actor from eventually becoming Latin America’s most famous star. He is scheduled to receive a lifetime achievement award Saturday for his work in about 40 productions at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, which runs through Aug. 2.

There will also be a retrospective showing of his most famous films, including “Rebellion in Patagonia,” the one that got him into so much trouble. “Rebellion” screened July 19. He discussed in an interview at last year’s Buenos Aires Film Festival, and in continuing e-mail correspondence, the perilous days in the 1970s when he stayed on the run to avoid capture by the military, which was killing many actors, writers and trade unionists.

In person and on film, Luppi embodies a quality of gracious authority whether playing a doctor in John Sayles’ “Men With Guns,” a beleaguered physician-administrator in an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War in Guillermo del Toro’s “The Devil’s Backbone” or a Uruguayan hijacker determined to derail Hollywood’s acquisition of a treasured locomotive in Diego Arsuaga’s “The Last Train.”

And masculine charm, enhanced rather than diminished by his 67 years, makes him an object of seduction in George Sluizer’s “The Stone Raft.” Two women!” he exclaimed with a chuckle. He also can’t resist a philosophical chuckle when recounting the cinematic deaths he’s endured. “That’s the story of my life,” he says.

But this lifetime achievement award comes at an auspicious turn in his career: He is directing his first film,”Steps,” in Madrid, where he has lived for the last few years. It is about friendship among three couples that changes after the attempted Spanish coup d’etat by Lt. Col Antonio Tejero Molina on Feb. 23, 1981, when he marched 50 rebel civil guards into Parliament to stage a military uprising. Based on an original script by Susana Fernandez Abascal, the story revolves around how the coup and subsequent affirmation of democracy affects their personal lives. In a recent e-mail, Luppi noted his eagerness to direct the film and the accompanying fear he felt in that new role. “Sometimes I wake up bathed in sweat, and to go back to sleep, I cross my fingers real hard until they hurt.”

As for the honor in L.A., Luppi says, “It is more than I deserve, but it makes me happy because it places me in the ranks of previous recipients and makes me feel solidarity with the Latin world.”

Directing was not something he contemplated when he was encountered last year at the Buenos Aires Film Festival.

“My dream from my childhood was to be great at drawing,” he said in a mixture of lightly accented English and Spanish, while recalling his early love for comic books like Flash Gordon and Tarzan. Later he fell in love with American literature: “Dos Passos, Hemingway, Faulkner, Caldwell, Kerouac and many others.”

He was born in a village in northern Argentina, and his father, a farmer and a butcher, wanted him to be an architect.

“At one moment, I thought I would be an architect because from time immemorial, architecture and drawing are very related. Great sculptors are often wonderful draftsmen. There’s an old saying that if someone cannot draw very well, he cannot paint. All the great painters were also very good draftsmen. In the literary world if a writer cannot understand the magical charge of the word, he cannot make literature. All this is to explain why I adored drawing.”

However, he was sidetracked into law school. “I didn’t love it, but I was influenced by American TV and fascinated by the idea that one could convince juries by acting, not by the law, but by the magic movement of the word.”

But he became disenchanted and dropped out. A chance visit to a theater rehearsal soon led him to study acting.

Before long he had his first theater job as a Nazi colonel in a play about Janusz Korczak, a Polish educator who dedicated his life to protecting Jewish children in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II and went to the concentration camps with them. (That true story was made into a controversial film by Andrzej Wajda.) Luppi loved the part because the colonel was not a one-dimensional character. “He had deep and painful issues of conscience.”

Issues of conscience were very much on the minds of Argentine artists and writers who lived through the turbulent days of Juan Peron and the successive military coups that followed his ouster in 1955. For a few years, Luppi was able to work in the theater and on TV.

In 1973, he starred in “Rebellion in Patagonia.” During a rare moment of liberalization, director Hector Olivera had received permission to make the film, which portrayed the army’s extermination in 1921 of hundreds of strikers, workers on the huge landed estates of rural Patagonia. Many of them were European immigrants. Luppi played Facon Grande (Big Knife), a gaucho who becomes a unionist. He is enlisted to organize farmhands because of his moral authority and his reputation for siding with the underdog.

By the time “Rebellion” was finished in April 1974, the military junta considered it a threat. Left-wing guerrillas were using a print of the film to train recruits when the right-wing military “kidnapped” it, Luppi said. Those connected to the film were considered supporters of the extreme left wing. Luppi was blacklisted for eight years and moved from one place to another to avoid capture. Olivera couldn’t make any new films. It was the period that became known as “the dirty war,” when an estimated 30,000 people were said to have “disappeared.”

“It was the worst military dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere,” Luppi said. At least the Nazis “with their Teutonic rigor” kept records of what they had done. In Argentina, “they worked in a perverted and sadistic way because they hid everything they did at night, without witnesses.”

Around 1976, a Spanish producer invited Luppi to Madrid to star in a play, “The Great Eye-Opener,” about a married couple at the painful end of their relationship. The trip abroad also provided a different kind of eye-opener.

Not only was the proposal a safety net for Luppi, keeping him from Argentina’s military junta, but he was also excited to observe the collapse of the Franco dictatorship. As Spain moved away from the fascist regime toward democratic elections, Luppi found the atmosphere as “fascinating and attractive as a Hemingway novel.”

But after a year, he returned to Argentina because he was worried about his two children, then 5 and 6 years old, who were living with his former wife. “They were safe, more or less, but the dictatorship didn’t respect any kind of relationship. You might be the one they were looking for, but they would get your sister or your friend.”

Those years left their mark. Luppi responded pessimistically when asked in a recent e-mail how he felt about a plan by newly elected Argentine President Nestor Kirchner to throw a fresh light on the long-dormant issue of the 30,000 “disappeared” during the dirty war.

“I feel a large part of my soul is deadened,” he said. “The lies and moral and financial deceit of the political leaders and functionaries of my country have been so numerous and so despicable, that, frankly, it has become difficult for me to attach any credibility to the new president’s initiatives. I don’t deny either the good faith nor the willingness of Kirchner to embark upon such a laborious task, but for many decades, Peronism has shown itself to be full of contradictions.

“For many, many years, it has been the dominant and majority ideology in Argentina, and that, with the help of military coups and the ineptitude and mediocrity of the Radical Party, have cast the country into total ruin. I do not accuse the new president of this, but if he wants to return some measure of faith to the people of Argentina, he must effectively break with the accomodationism and self-serving policies of the party. I wish him well.”

Earlier, reflecting on the fighting around the world today, Luppi talked about hating “the business of war hidden under the blanket of a crusade for freedom. None of us can stop feeling the horrors that we are living in, but we need in our soul dreams of utopia. You can’t live without dreams. How can you live without love, without wine, without potatoes, without films?”