The legendary actress Adela Legrá died at dawn this Friday in the city of Santiago de Cuba, as confirmed by the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Arts and Industry (ICAIC) on its social networks.
He is one of the best-known faces of Cuban cinema, thanks to protagonists like those in the film Lucy (1968), by Humberto Solás. The actress was 86 years old and had been “emergencyly hospitalized at the provincial hospital.”
About Adela Legrá’s participation in that film by Solás, the filmmaker Manuel Iglesias, Remembering his face to promote this work, he has written that it is “one of the most powerful images in all of Cuban cinema.”
Born in Guantánamo, in 1939, before coming to the cinema, Legrá dedicated herself to household and agricultural work in different parts of the former province of Oriente, participating in the collection of coffee and the planting and harvesting of food and vegetables, she recalls. Cubadebate.
It was in Baracoa where her destiny changed definitively, because while she was working as an activist for the Federation of Cuban Women, she was discovered by Solás, who offered her the leading role in the medium-length film Manuela (1965).
The film, this media notes, achieved notable success in Cuba and at international festivals, and revealed a natural actress, with great expressive force.
“Her strong and beautiful face, deeply rural, along with her sincerity and interpretive freshness, made her the ideal choice to embody Lucía in the third story of the film Lucía, a masterpiece of Cuban and Latin American cinema. Since then, Adela Legrá was forever inscribed in the cultural history of the nation,” he points out. Cubadebate.
Legrá demonstrated his talent in other films such as Rancher (1976), The Brigadier (1977), That long night (1979), Red Powder (1981), Honey for Oshún (2001) and Cuba neighborhood (2005), as well as various works for Cuban Television.
In 2017 she received the Lucía de Honor Award, presented by the Gibara International Poor Cinema Festival, in recognition of her career and her link to the filmography of Humberto Solás.
The body will be laid to rest in the next few hours at the El Calvario Funerary, in Santiago de Cuba, according to CubaCinema.
