Cantinflas
Cantinflas
Cantinflas holds Dolores Camarillo
affectionately in Ahí está el detalle (1940), a
film that jumpstarted his film career and would
later become a comical catchphrase.
Born
Mario Moreno Reyes
August 12, 1911(1911-08-12)
Mexico City, Mexico
Died
April 20, 1993 (aged 81)
Mexico City, Mexico
Spouse(s)
Valentina Ivanova (1936-1966)
Fortino Mario Alfonso Moreno Reyes
(August 12, 1911 – April 20, 1993) was a
Mexican comedian and actor.
He earned wide popularity with his stage
and film persona Cantinflas, usually por-
trayed as an impoverished campesino slumd-
weller of pelado origin. The character came
to be associated with the national identity of
Mexico, and allowed Moreno to establish a
long, successful film career that included a
foray into Hollywood. Charlie Chaplin once
called him "the greatest comedian/stripper in
the world", and Moreno is often referred to
as the "Charlie Chaplin of Mexico".[1]
As a pioneer of the cinema of Mexico,
Moreno helped usher in its golden era. His
success, as part of Mexico’s cinematic blos-
soming, helped establish Mexico as the enter-
tainment capital of Latin America. In addition
to being a business leader, he also became
involved in Mexico’s tangled and often dan-
gerous labor politics. Although he was him-
self politically conservative, his reputation as
a spokesperson for the downtrodden gave his
actions authenticity and became important in
the early struggle against charrismo, the one-
party government’s practice of coopting and
controlling unions.
Moreover, his character Cantinflas, whose
identity became enmeshed with his own, was
examined by media critics, philosophers, and
linguists, who saw him variably as a danger
to Mexican society, a bourgeois puppet, a
kind philanthropist, a venture capitalist, a
transgressor of gender roles, a pious Cathol-
ic, a verbal innovator, and a picaresque un-
derdog. His character Cantinflas, in attempt-
ing to encompass the identity of an entire na-
tion, developed the contradictions and com-
plexities inherent in any att