Héctor Alterio arrived in Madrid in the seventies when, threatened with death by Triple A, he had to flee his native Argentina. But he was soon accepted as one of the Madrid acting profession, to the point that he had not even been in Spain for a year when he was already visiting the places where an actor could find work at that time. Café Gijón on Paseo de Recoletos and Dolly on Príncipe Street. So it’s not that there weren’t cell phones. There was no way to locate the actors, so given to pensions and wandering around friends’ houses.
The theater spectator discovered him in the cast of Weddings that were famous from Pingajo and Fandanga, by José María Rodríguez Méndez. From then on he never gave up the theater, where he found himself.
The remembered theater critic Eduardo Haro Tecglen, always so tough and accurate, surrendered to Alterio after seeing in 2004 one of his most emblematic works “Claudio is Héctor Alterio and it is the most impressive thing in the show.” It was just the first of the praise after seeing the actor starring I, Claudioby Robert Graves, under the direction of José Carlos Plaza, a professional into whose hands Alterio fell on several occasions, such as in the brilliant staging of The Etruscan smileby José Luis Sampedro, where the actor and his partner, Julieta Serrano, shone with their own light back in 2012.
We found another of his interpretative summits in 2009 with two lessby the Frenchman Samuel Benchetrit, where he met for the first time on stage with José Sacristán, with whom he had already shared the screen on several occasions. That was a wonderful duel between these two greats and seeing them on stage was one of the great gifts that any self-respecting theater spectator can aspire to.
Although the same could also be found in works such as The fatherby Florian Zeller, in 2016, or that Argentine staging on all four sides of The tunnel by Ernesto Sabato. Without forgetting unusual proposals such as the one he accepted from the Dance Theater to represent, together with Lola Greco, in Dump, by Michel de Gelderode, to an absolutely ridiculous king who for Alterio was full of attractive and unexpected edges for an actor.
Also another work that is impossible to forget is the one he did with Lola Herrera in the theatrical version (much better told than the film version) of The golden pondby Ernest Thompson, in 2013.
But among his many acting works it is difficult to forget a wonderful performance that he gave together with the great actor Paco Casares in 1992 in The cats, by Agustín Gómez Arcos, in one of the few pieces that have been performed by this ignored and ignored author in Spain and in which intolerance and repression were addressed with irony and intelligence.
The actor did not stop working until very recently and in recent years he offered continuous shows halfway between the poetic recital and the old café theater proposals, where he always stood out for his good taste in the selection and his perfectionism in the execution. Just a few days ago Alterio was representing a little story directed and authored by Angela Bacaicoa, the actor’s life partner, who together with him created this piece in which he recounted his emotional round-trips between Argentina and Madrid, and with which he became the oldest active actor on the Spanish scene.
Alterio was not about method, nor about the method (Stanislavski and satellites), he always said it: “My method when approaching a job is sweat and tears.