Ramiro Oliveros was always clear that his life was worth more than his profession. He was a pioneering actor in his desire to train abroad in the 1960s; ambitious in his efforts not to resign himself to the role of leading man to which his physique and his voice condemned him; determined to retire in full condition when he did not find characters of substance; and courageous in putting love for the woman in his life, Concha Márquez Piquer, before everything else. In recent times he was fighting lung and heart problems. Last October he suffered a heart attack and this Wednesday he died of a multi-organ failure at his home in Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid).
She was 82 years old and had not wanted to live since the singer died a year and a half ago at the Quirón Hospital, the same one where she had been treated in recent months. They had been married since 1982 and the actor boasted that in all these years they had only spent two nights apart for work. We have the memory of Oliveros in the gossip press, but it is that he got off the stage more than twenty years ago, with a Don Juan Tenorio together with Juan Carlos Naya at the Spanish Theater and ‘Eloísa is under an almond tree’, in the centenary of Jardiel Poncela. The last time he stood in front of a camera was in the series “Can you do it?”, in 2004.
Since then, this film, theater and television actor, as well as a stage director, took Márquez Piquer as a source of inspiration for novels published in the Lekla publishing house and theater pieces: ‘The seven circles of smoke’, ‘The endless baroness’ and a book that collected the vicissitudes of their coexistence for more than forty years: ‘You would not be mine if you had not made me yours’, subtitled ‘Biography of a love’. “There I tell endless anecdotes, no gossip from those people who dirty the minds of those who listen to them,” he clarified in the AISGE magazine, the performers’ rights management entity.
Born in Madrid in 1941, Ramiro Oliveros studied medicine but carried the poison of acting inside. He deceived his father by telling him that he was going to England for summer courses to get a passport and once there he trained with the director Joan Littlewood in a theater in Barons Court. He then continued studying in Paris and Frankfurt, until it was time to return to Spain. After amnesty was decreed for those who did not report for military service, Oliveros managed to obtain his ATS degree thanks to his medical studies and began working at the Hospital de la Princesa. At the same time, he built a stage in a rented house in Atocha and founded an independent theater group to stage plays by Pinter and Brecht that commercial theaters did not show.
After touring Spain in a Seat 1,400, sleeping in tents and seedy pensions, the stage presence of Ramiro Oliveros does not go unnoticed. The producer of Spanish Television Luis Enciso asked him for ‘Eleven Hour’, a dramatic space in the style of ‘Estudio 1’ in which plays were recorded. In 1974 he made his film debut with ‘El swamp of the crows’, shot in Ecuador, and that year alone he appeared in seven films, including ‘Vida conjugal sana’, by Roberto Bodegas, a key title of the so-called Third Way, halfway between auteur cinema and popular comedies. ‘I am already a woman’, ‘Volvoreta’, ‘Naked therapy’, ‘Memories of Leticia Valle’, ‘The powerful influence of the moon’ and series like ‘Open regime’ and ‘The saga of the Rius’ are told in one filmography close to fifty titles.
Oliveros alternated independent theater with ‘B-series’ film productions in which he even appeared under a pseudonym, as Raymond Oliver in ‘El swamp of the crows’, by Manuel Caño. ‘Virus’, ‘Journey to the afterlife’, ‘Crystal Tower’ and ‘Hundra’ belong to this group. His deep voice also helped him work as a dubbing actor: the character of George Peppard in ‘Team A’, without going any further. The trigger for his withdrawal came from the series ‘All men are equal’, in which he agreed to replace an actor for five episodes that would become sixty. While filming in a town in Madrid, a group of people called him Iñaki, the name of his character. «That they had reduced me to the category of that character after all my history in film, theater and television made me so angry that I swore to myself that I would never lend myself to work, unless the character had more meat than that idiot to whom I lent my voice and my person,” he justified.
Ramiro Oliveros was married three times. He had two children with his first wife, who died in 1974, and with his second, the Argentine photographer Consuelo Buenader, he married in 1977 and separated in 1982. That same year he married Concha Márquez Piquer, who never wanted to. the annulment of her marriage to the bullfighter Curro Romero. Love had emerged during the recording of the cooking show ‘Red-handed’, although it seemed to the singer that Oliveros “looked more like a lover than a husband”.
They had a daughter, Iris Amor. “If it weren’t for her, I would have ended my life the day Concha died,” the actor confessed a year and a half ago, after a funeral in which the actor read one of the many poems dedicated to the woman of his life. The macabre anecdote of the day was carried out by the actor’s mobile phone, which he inadvertently dropped and ended up in Márquez Piquer’s coffin. For days, he called the San Isidro cemetery for an operator to come to the tombstone and check if he was still giving a signal. “Even if the mobile battery runs out, she will recharge it, for sure,” he joked.
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