Actress Margarita Lozano, who worked with Buñuel, Leone or Pasolini, dies at 91

The actress Margarita Lozano, an icon of Spanish cinema who worked with great creators such as Luis Buñuel or Pier Paolo Pasolini, has died at dawn this Monday at the age of 91 at her home in Puntas de Calnegre, in the Murcian municipality of Lorca, has confirmed the City Council of this town, where he lived his last years.

Lozano had received on June 23 the Gold Medal for Fine Arts, awarded by the Council of Ministers, in recognition of her career in film, which led her to share the screen with actors such as Francisco Rabal or Clint Eastwood.

Born in Tetouan in 1931, where her father, a soldier, was stationed, her childhood and youth were spent in Lorca, who in 2014 named her Adoptive Daughter.

Lozano moved to Madrid at the age of 19 to study fashion and design, and she soon decided to focus on her theatrical vocation.

With the help of director Miguel Narros, she participated in important theatrical productions in the fifties and sixties, a career that she combined with cinema.

In 1958 she signed her first character in Italy, in Giuseppe Vari's film

.

And so she acted under the orders of Sergio Leone in

in

by César Fernández Ardavín, which won the Golden Bear at the 1959 Berlinale;

of Fernando Fernán Gómez in

of Luis Buñuel in

Francisco Rovira Beleta in

of Mario Camus in

or Pier Paolo Pasolini in

within her fruitful career in Italy in titles where she used to appear accredited as Margherita Lozano.

After a voluntary retirement, after marrying an Italian engineer (the marriage lasted forty years until his death) with whom she lived in Madagascar, Upper Volta (today Burkina Faso), Morocco and other African countries —and falling in love with this continent — and if she was a mother, she returned to the cinema in the eighties, with the Taviani brothers, who directed her in

,

and

,

.

In Spain, it was Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón who recovered her in

(1986), with which she won the ACE Award (New York) for best supporting actress.

In that return she collaborated with Claude Berri on

and

with Nani Moretti in

or with Basilio Martín Patino in

“I am not a fetish of anyone, what happens is that when I work, if I am comfortable, a great relationship and a lot of friendship are created, and the directors and I end up liking each other, and that is why they call me”, he said in an interview in 1998 in THE COUNTRY.

His last appearance on stage was, under the direction of Amelia Ochandiano, in the classic

, by Federico García Lorca, between 2005 and 2007, after having recently performed

, by Pirandello, directed by Miguel Narros, his great friend and fetish director on stage.

In the last four decades of work she only acted in the theater four times by her own decision.

“We will always be very grateful to him for taking the name of his land all over the world”, said the mayor of Lorca, Diego José Mateos.

The burning chapel will be installed in Lozano's house at the express wish of the family.

She had combined decades of life between that blue house in Puntas, on the Murcian coast, and a 17th-century mansion on the outskirts of Rome.

”There I don't know anything, I've managed to be a complete lollipop and look silly, but this is another way of living that I love.

Between isolation and old age I am becoming even cerril ”, she joked.

And in 2006 he confessed: “The theater is where you can get to know all cultures, all history, but I can't talk much about theater because I've forgotten what I knew and what there is now I don't know... I just want to do what I like, which is very simple: