Martha Roth with Ana Patricia Rojo PHOTO: David Bolaños/CUARTOSCURO.COM
In 2022, website money.co.uk published a study that ranked the world’s 50 most beautiful countries by analyzing the number of natural wonders in each location, from coral reefs and rainforests to volcanoes, glaciers and more. . Mexico was among the top five places.
And the fact is that the Latin American country has (almost) everything: gastronomy, history, art, climate, people. What foreigner (and countryman) hasn’t fallen in love with that? Well, decades ago (many) years ago, a Hungarian cellist did too, and decided that his long-established family should also appreciate these wonders. Just before the 1940s, an Italian woman who would go on to become a showbiz star settled in Mexico. It was about Martha Roth, the actress with the pretty eyes.
Roth was one of the great acting revelations of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema and had very important recognitions, which, however, became insignificant as a result Tragedies that overshadowed his adult life.
It was impossible to ignore her: already as a child she was distinguished by her fair skin and blue eyes, she also had a talent for singing and music, but thanks to her dramatic skills she shared with the Japanese director Seki Sano, father of , perfected Mexican theater, acting became his profession.
Going to the cinema was almost obligatory for her, she simply lacked the opportunity that she got thanks to some beauty contests that she won and that caught the attention of director Alejandro Galindo, who included her in his film a large familythe story of a middle-class family in Mexico City shaken to its core by the emergence of an electronics dealer who challenges family cohesion while everyone tries to adapt to the modern times.
One family of many was crowned with success at the 1950 Ariel ceremony: film, direction, adaptation, set design and female collaboration for Roth.
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From that moment the actress did not stop working and appeared in more than 40 films, including El Abandonado, Una gringuita en México, A media luz, Rostros olvidados and They should never have been love, among others. In these feature films he shared with great actors such as Columba Domínguez, Libertad Lamarque, Pedro Armendáriz, Abel Salazar, Jorge Mistral and Arturo de Córdova to name a few.
With a burgeoning career and some forays into foreign productions, fame was almost assured, but a personal issue led her to another project: starting a family. In the 1960s she married composer Rubén Fuentes (La Bikina, Cien años, Qué bonita es mi tierra), with whom she had two children, Leonardo and Alejandro.
They were the weighty reason for staying off the forums for at least eight years, but many also questioned her motherhood style, which some saw as overprotective and overprotective. In an interview, he addressed this harsh charge and said that he has no regrets about his decisions, which, according to Imagen EntRENimiento, have given him the opportunity to see his children grow up.
In the early 1970s, the actress allowed herself to return to television in soap operas: In “Nosotras las mujeres” she played “Mónica”, a modern family mother who becomes her children’s best friend, a noble “Amalia” who turns into a Wheelchair in Eclipse, an uncompromising “Dame Elizabeth Pointer” in Oyuki’s Sin. No matter what role she was cast in, she always stood out as a cultured woman.
But in his personal life the shadow of tragedy began to loom. After a few years of marriage to Fuentes, she suddenly ended. He took this episode calmly because he knew in his mind and in his heart that they were no longer working together and that he would make the best of the experience.
Just before Christmas 1984, Roth lost his eldest son Leonardo in a car accident; his son Alejandro also died in 2000. In an interview with El Universal newspaper in 2006, the actress said that losing was something that always terrified her.
“Unfortunately, what I feared most, losing my children, happened to me”, Martha commented, adding that it was an immense, painful and horrific blow. “And to think that they were criticizing me for the over-care that I was taking with them. I was certainly committed to seeing them grow, so much so that I retired from my artistic work for a long time. What worried me the most was that “something was going to happen to them,” he said.
She did not experience the tragedy alone, she was accompanied by her second husband, who Filmmaker Fernando Pérez Gavilán (Los Caifanes, 600 Miles, From Prada to Nada, Educando a mamá), but he acknowledged that the actress never recovered. “She always took my kids as her own, but losing hers was horrible and she could never get over it.”he told the Ventaneando program in 2016.
Martha Roth continued to work and did her best in soap operas and films (total 40 tapes and about 15 soap operas). He retired from the limelight at the age of 75 after attending Dying is in Hebrew and Distilling love; and she decided to place herself alone in the care of specialists from the Casa Parque nursing home, although her husband always tried to accompany her.
Friends of the actress said the will of the Italian, triumphant in Mexico, was to have to die alone and with the pain of having lost her children because she did not want and wanted someone to take care of her Be a “nuisance” . for your loved ones.
I’m almost there. In that interview for Ventenando that Pérez Gavilán gave, he said Roth died of a sudden heart attack, “his death was quick. He ate, he started coughing and that’s where he went into cardiac arrest.”
The actress died on October 7, 2016 in Mexico City at the age of 84.