Last Saturday, October 8, the renowned Cuban actor Mario Balmaseda passed away at 81 years old. One of the island’s leading performers, he was the only Cuban actor to have received all three of the country’s most prestigious national acting awards, for theater (2006), television (2019), and film (2021). In cinema, he participated in over 30 films, an he was best known in film for his performances in The Last Supper / La última cena by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, One Way or Another / De cierta manera by Sara Gómez, House for Swap / Se permuta by Juan Carlos Tabío, and The Project of the Century / La obra del siglo by Carlos M. Quintela.
Born in Havana on January 19, 1941, Balmaseda’s first exposure to acting was in the Santos and Artigas Circus, before going on to study in la Escuela de Artes y Oficios. Although much of his family left Cuba after 1959, he joined the military where he became part of the Workers Theatrical Brigade. He joined the Teatro Ocuje where he collaborated with Omar Valdés, Tito Junco, Daysi Granados, Samuel Claxton and Miguel Benavides.
Balmaseda studied in the National Theater and in Germany, before going on to have a 50 year career in film, theater, and television. His cinematic debut was in the 1971 feature film The Days of the Water / Los días del agua by Manuel Octavio Gómez. A couple of years later he participated in the film The Man from Maisinicu / El hombre de Maisinicú, which premiered at the Moscow Film Festival, and played widely internationally.
In 1974, he played the role of Mario in the landmark film One Way or Another, the first and only feature by Afro-Cuban director Sara Gómez, who died at 31 while editing the film. The acclaimed neorealist romantic drama about the rocky relationship between a revolutionary schoolteacher and a retrograde factory-worker mixes documentary-style footage with a fictional story set in Havana’s poor neighborhoods shortly after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The film, which has been hailed as a bold work of revolutionary feminism, was recently restored and has been screened in numerous cinematheques internationally.
In 1976, Balmaseda participated in The Last Supper, Gutiérrez Alea’s classical satire of religion and colonialism set in a sugar plantation in the 18th century, about a fanatically religious landowner who recreates the Biblical last supper with 12 slaves. During the late seventies and early eighties, the Cuban actor participated in numerous films including Río Negro by Manuel Pérez, The Teacher / El brigadista by Octavio Cortázar, Maluala by Sergio Giral, and Son o no son by Julio García Espinosa.
In 1985, Balmaseda worked in the cherished comedy House for Swap by Juan Carlos Tabío, also starring popular Cuban actress Rosita Fornés. The film tells the story of Gloria, a feisty woman who devises elaborate schemes to move to a modern apartment from their old house to keep her daughter away from her boyfriend, but those plans will soon backfire.
During the rest of the eighties and most of the nineties, Balmaseda combined his film career with his work in television. Other film credits include Baragua by José Massip, En tres y dos by Rolando Díaz, Papeles secundarios by Orlando Rojas, and Between Two Hurricanes / Entre ciclones by Enrique Colina.
In 2015, Balmaseda played the role of Otto in The Project of the Century by Carlos M. Quintela, about an engineer who survives with his father and son in an abandoned Soviet nuclear project in Cuba. The black-and-white drama was awarded the prestigious Tiger Award for Best Film at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Balmaseda’s final film performance was in Rigoberto López’s Forbidden Flights / Vuelos prohibidos in 2015.
In March of 2021, Balmaseda received the 2021 National Film Award, the most important cinema award in Cuba, "for his versatility and career in the seventh art, theater and television."
