At the beginning of Andy García’s career (Havana, Cuba, 67 years old), a casting director wanted to check if he was strong enough for a role and asked him to take off his shirt. “Take it off first,” the actor responded before leaving the room. Had she been an actress, this would have been the last anecdote of his career, but a man can afford to defend his integrity without fear of reprisals. García had the opportunity to develop a career in which he has remained faithful to his principles without ever exhibiting his body or starring in sexual scenes. “I don’t want to go down that path,” he stated bluntly. before the journalist Mónica Garza. Something that has not prevented him from becoming a sex symbols despite himself.
In the mid-eighties, García was predicted to have a career similar to that of Robert de Niro. 40 years later, however, the prophecy has been unfulfilled. Despite his status as an actor blessed by Coppola or De Palma, in recent years he has found himself involved in projects inappropriate to his talent and diluted in ensemble casts. Proof of this decline is that some of the highest-grossing projects in which the star has been involved, since the trilogy of Ocean’s Eleven (2001-2008), be Geostorm (2017) either A chihuahua in Beverly Hills (2008). Or that his most critically acclaimed recent role is a Latin version of The bride’s father with Gloria Estefan (premiered on HBO Max) where he showed off a comedic look that we are not used to. Its grand premiere this 2023 is the fourth installment of The mercenaries, the new adventures of the band of old glories of action cinema headed by Sylvester Stallone.
A scenario that was unthinkable a few years ago for someone who was the most relevant Latin actor since Anthony Quinn and maintained a perfect balance between independent films and popular cinema for a decade. Contrary to what is usual, his career was not consolidated. “García never made it despite his Latin ardor and a darkly dangerous stupendous appearance. “Why didn’t he become the next De Niro or Pacino?” he was wondering The Guardian.
Not even to buy cigars
Andrés Arturo García Menéndez, his full name, was 5 years old when his family left Cuba and took refuge in the United States, as a result of the revolution against the dictator Fulgencio Batista and the rise of Fidel Castro. His mother was an English teacher and his father was a prestigious lawyer who owned an avocado plantation in the municipality of Bejucal. That privileged property and a house facing the sea in an exclusive neighborhood of Havana were the scene of his childhood until he abruptly found himself living with his parents, brothers and grandmother in a one-room house. The once wealthy family arrived in Miami Beach with just $300 and a box of cigars. They started from scratch.
“That first Christmas we didn’t even have enough to buy gifts for the children,” he confessed. the actor’s mother, Amelie García. “But the children never heard us complain about what we had lost, only about our longing to return.” A constant desire in the actor’s life, which has been reflected in his projects as a director: for example, the script by Guillermo Cabrera Infante The lost City (2005), a long-cherished project that included Inés Sastre, Bill Murray and Dustin Hoffman, a love song to their longed-for Cuba, like the documentary Cachao… there are no two like his rhythm (1993), about the also emigrated Cuban musician Cachao.
García’s first passion in the United States was basketball, which he intended to pursue professionally until acute hepatitis derived from mononucleosis kept him in dry dock for a year. He ended up opting for acting, although his father preferred him to run the family business. “My parents come from a generation where an actor was Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant. “I’m sure they loved me very much, but they also thought: my son is not Humphrey Bogart,” joked in The New York Times. Luck came to him in the form of a small role in the pilot of Hill Street Sad Song (1981), Steven Bochco’s masterpiece that would change police series forever.
If there are recently famous actors like Pedro Pascal who continue to regret how difficult it was for them to escape the cliché of the Latino criminal in the beginning, we can imagine what this meant in the eighties. Andy García not only didn’t want to be a stereotype, he didn’t want to be pigeonholed either. “When I started, they only offered me gang members. He told casting directors: ‘I didn’t study Latin acting, I studied Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams,’ he declared during a tribute to his career held last year at the Red Sea Film Festival in Saudi Arabia.
After seeing him as the villain of Eight million ways to die (1986), Brian de Palma called him to play Frank Nitti, the elegant hitman of The Untouchables by Eliot Ness (1987) who, in a nod to Vertigo (1958) by Hitchcock, ends up flying in one of the film’s most iconic sequences. “He was mean, tough and cunning. we think [al ver Ocho millones…]: ‘Wow, what a great killer!’ he told People producer Art Linson. But García had another desire, a juicier role and on the other side of the law. “I responded that he wanted to play a police officer and he looked at me as if he were a Martian.” He aspired to be the accurate marksman of Italian roots, George Stone, and he achieved it. De Palma’s film earned four Oscar nominations, critical support, and a respectable box office. From a legendary filmmaker and the mafia he went to another renowned author, Ridley Scott, and the Yakuza in blackrain (1989), another popular success, and to be Richard Gere’s antagonist in dirty affairs (1990), a character written expressly for him. While he was preparing for it, however, another Italian role would come to him that was going to change his life. García came to the cinema when no one was talking about cultural appropriation. If Natalie Wood, of Russian origin, could play the Puerto Rican Maria and John Wayne had been Genghis Khan, why wouldn’t a Cuban be the Corleone heir?
When it began to be rumored that Francis Ford Coppola was preparing The Godfather: Part III (1990), half of Hollywood’s actors tried to sneak into it. Garcia pressured his agent and ended up competing with Alec Baldwin, Val Kilmer and Charlie Sheen for the role of Vincent Mancini, Michael Corleone’s impetuous nephew, the titular heir not only to a mafia empire, but perhaps even to a future fourth installment. which there were rumors about for years.
He got his first and only Oscar nomination thanks to that performance, but the film was not the phenomenon that was expected. In its premiere it failed to displace first place at the box office Home alone (1990) and the reviews were not very flattering. It didn’t help that Winona Ryder withdrew from the project at the last minute and her character, Mary Corleone, Michael’s daughter and romantic interest of Garcia’s character, fell to the inexperienced Sofia Coppola, the director’s daughter.
After working with the most relevant directors, García was a star, but the definitive push was missing. He appeared in die yet (1991), Kenneth Branagh’s supernatural intrigue, and the comedy Accidental hero by Stephen Frears, films that were very well received, but did not consolidate his career. And, above all, he opted for too many failed projects: the thriller brimming with clichés Jennifer 8 (1992), romantic drama When a man loves a woman (1994), where he was the devoted husband of an alcoholic woman played by Meg Ryan at a time when no one wanted to see America’s Smile drunk and hitting her daughter, or Things to do in Denver when you’re dead (1995), little gem not to go It could have been a classic but no one knew how to sell it. None of them were painful, but neither was a knock on the table. She headlined posters, there were no clichés and his Latin identity was irrelevant in the scripts, but his career entered an induced coma from which he was only rescued by Soderbergh in Ocean’s Eleven.
García is aware that perhaps he has a difficult personality. “By my own nature, I tend to feel comfortable swimming a little against the current,” he has stated. Religious and with conservative political ideas, in 2010 he told The weekly country: “How many times have I heard from producers that ‘Andy, sex sells!’ I don’t doubt it, but sell it to someone else.” Another reason for his reluctance to sexual scenes is that he considers that they imply a lack of respect for his wife, María Victoria Lorido, whom he met in 1975, the same day he asked for her hand. “Some people have known each other for a while and first there is a friendship, but when we met that night, it was very clear that she was the woman of my life,” told to People. “I didn’t want it to get away.” Seven years later they married, have four children and form one of the strongest couples in Hollywood. “For me, marriage is like a religion, you have to practice it and be faithful.” The family, she says, is the center of her life and that has led her to lose roles. If a project made it difficult for her to be with her children, she rejected it: “I am a father and that is my priority.”
That firmness was evident in a curious controversy with Antonio Banderas experienced, precisely, through the pages of this newspaper in the early nineties. The man from Malaga made some statements to The weekly country in which he stated that García was an emigrant “who doesn’t want to be an emigrant, he wants to be an American.” [en el sentido de estadounidense]”. The words reached García’s ears and were distorted by Guillermo Cabrera Infante. In a letter to the director, the writer reminded Banderas that his first big role in Hollywood, The mambo kings play love songs (1992), had come to him after García’s refusal to appear in the film – something that happened again in Two many (1995), in this case due to a question of dates—although the main reason for his anger was that the Cuban was referred to as an emigrant and not as an exile.
“Strangely, Banderas, who has succeeded as he deserves in Hollywood, insists again and again on vilifying Andy García. These repeated protests of yours do not sound like a genuine actor, but rather like an attack on a well-known asset of the profession.” Banderas apologized in another open letter, praised the actor (“one of the greatest supporters of Latin culture through his work and his private life, both inside and outside the United States”) and expressed his desire to work together. some day. It hasn’t happened yet, but both kings of mambo still have a long career ahead of them.
You can follow ICON on Facebook, Twitter, instagramor subscribe here to the Newsletter.
#sex #ironclad #beliefs #rivalry #Banderas #Andy #García #Latino #reign #Hollywood