Prominent Chilean actress Bélgica Castro has died at the age of 99, on her birthday and one day after her husband, actor Alejandro Sieveking died at age 83. Born in Concepción on March 6, 1921, she participated in more than 100 plays and had an outstanding film career, working with filmmakers such as Raúl Ruiz, Andrés Wood and Sebastián Silva, and winning Chile’s National Art Prize in 1995.
The daughter of Spanish exiled parents, Castro was studied in Temuco. In 1940, she moved to Santiago to study Spanish at the Pedagogical Institute of the University of Chile, where she joined the theater group Cadip. She became one of the founders of the Experimental Theater of the University of Chile.
She and her husband formed their own company, El Teatro del Ángel. In 1974, they both went into exile to Costa Rica following Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’etat few months earlier. They lived in San José until the end if of 1984, having success with their theater company.
Her cinematographic debut was in the 1944 film Hollywood es así by Jorge Délano. In 1970 she participated in Luis Cornejo’s The End of the Game / El final de juego, and three years later she worked with renowned auteur Raúl Ruiz in Little White Dove / Palomita blanca playing the role of María’s godmother. He worked with Ruiz again in the 2004 film Days in the Country / Días de Campo in the role of Paulita, as well as in the 2007 miniseries La Recta Provincia.
She worked with Sebastián Silva in his 2007 debut feature Life Kills Me / La vida me mata, for which she received the Altazor Award for Best Actress, and in 2010 in Old Cats / Gatos viejos, co-directed by Pedro Peirano and co-starring her husband Sieveking. In the film, which was a hit at the New York Film Festival and had a theatrical run at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Castro plays the leading role of Isadora, an octogenarian living comfortably with her husband Enrique and two cats, who suddenly finds herself fighting a battle on two fronts when the onset of dementia arrives at the same time that her daughter’s attempt to scheme the landlord seems to require that Isadora sign over the lease on her Santiago apartment. Unfolding with black humor and empathy in equal measure, the film emphasizes both the confusion in Isadora’s psyche and the claustrophobia of her domestic landscape. She was presented with the Best Actress Award at the 16th edition of Festivalisimo, the Ibero-Latin American Film Festival of Montreal.
Castro worked in two films directed by Andrés Wood: El desquite in 1999 and The Good Life / La buena vida in 2009, for which she was presented her second Altazor Award for Best Actress. Her performance as a Russian scientist in Ricardo Larraín’s 2208 film Chile puede was awarded with the Best Actress Prize at the Viña del Mar International Film Festival, and the APES Award for Best Supporting Actress.
In addition to her acting career, she was a professor at the University of Chile's Theater School and at the Theater School of the Catholic University of Chile and at the University of Costa Rica.
