Sara Rita de la Luz GarcÃÂa (3 September 1892 – 21 November 1980) was a Mexican actress and comedian who made her biggest mark during the "Golden Age of Mexican cinema". During the 1940s and 1950s, she often played the part of a no-nonsense but lovable grandmother in numerous Mexican films. In later years, she played parts in Mexican telenovelas.
GarcÃÂa is remembered by her nickname, La Abuelita de México ("Mexico's Grandmother").
Sara Rita de la Luz GarcÃÂa was born on 3 September 1892 at Orizaba Veracruz. Her parents were Spaniards from the Andalusia region in Spain, Isidoro GarcÃÂa Ruiz, an architect, and his wife Felipa Hidalgo de Ruiz. In the early 1900s, she contracted murine typhus and infected her mother, who died months later.
At the age of nine, she and her father moved back to Mexico City, where through a scholarship called "lugar de gracia" (Spanish for, "place of grace"), she was accepted into the Colegio de las VizcaÃÂnas to pursue her academic studies. Shortly after her arrival to the city, her father suffered a stroke and was admitted into the "Casa de Beneficencia Española" (Spanish for, "Spanish Benevolent House") where he died on an unknown date. Orphaned, she remained as a boarder at the school until she came of age, being "adopted" by the nuns of the institution, which was founded on the principles of the Catholic Church. There she met , a girl with whom she formed a strong emotional bond. Upon graduating from that school, where she spent some time teaching as a drawing teacher, she decided to pursue a career as an actress in 1916, after watching the filming of a movie at the Azteca Films studios, which she discovered while walking through the Alameda Central.
Sara started her film career at age 25, participating as an extra in what would be her first film, En defensa Propia (1917). After that she began auditioning in the theater where she started getting small roles. Her diction and voice gave her prestige and she became part of the most outstanding companies of that time: Mercedes Navarro, Prudencia Grifell and the sisters Anita and Isabelita Blanch. In one of her tours throughout the Mexican Republic, she met Fernando Ibáñez, whom she had seen during the filming of "La soñadora" (1917).
In 1918, she married Fernando Ibáñez. They toured throughout Mexico and Central America, until at a stop in Tepic, she gave birth to a girl, whom they named Fernanda Mercedes Ibáñez GarcÃÂa. Sara decided to take care of her daughter, and stopped touring. Her absence bothered Fernando, who began to get involved in several affairs, then became entangled with the head of the company. Sara divorced her husband and left with her daughter. At that point, Rosario, who had divorced her husband, met her again when she attended to her at the corset shop "La Europea" on República de Uruguay street, where she worked. Upon learning of her situation, she offered her help in caring for her daughter in a kind of shared parenting, and also offered her a place to live in her small house located on Mesones Street in the Historic Center of Mexico City, where she lived with her mother, her sister Blanca, and her brother-in-law. In this way, Sara became part of the González Cuenca family. Years later her ex-husband became sick, and returned home. Sara cared for him, even paying his expenses, until his death in 1932. Established firmly in the theater, she began to be called to work in the cinema.
Her daughter Fernanda also ventured into the cinema with the movie "La madrina del diablo" (1937) in which she played Jorge Negrete's girlfriend. On 18 October 1940, MarÃÂa Fernanda Ibáñez died at the age of 20 from an internal hemorrhage, in which her first grandchild, who she was expecting with her husband, also died.
Film actress Emma Roldán suggested Sara GarcÃÂa for the role of Doña Panchita, an old woman, in the 1940 film Allá en el trópico ("There in the Tropics"). The film's director Fernando de Fuentes considered GarcÃÂa too young for the part (indeed she was only in her mid 40s) but Roldán replied, saying "Sara is an actress, and actresses don't have an age". For the screen test, Sara GarcÃÂa had a wig made for her. At the time of the screen test, the director asked the crew of her whereabouts and when they answered that she was the woman in front of him, the director was shocked: Her wig, lack of teeth, and performance had touched him. It is in Fernando de Fuentes' Allá en el trópico where Sara GarcÃÂa won her title of la Abuelita de México (Mexico's Grandmother).
In 1942, Sara GarcÃÂa co-starred with JoaquÃÂn Pardavé in El baisano Jalil, a comedy film in which she portrayed the wife of a Lebanese-immigrant family, one of the marginalized communities that settled in the La Lagunilla neighborhood of Mexico City. She starred again with Pardavé in a similar comedy, El barchante Neguib (1945).
She then started a long series of films, co-starring with the brightest stars of the Mexican cinema, such as Cantinflas, Jorge Negrete, and Germán Valdés "Tin-Tan".
She often starred as the grandmother of famous Mexican actor Pedro Infante. Her most remembered film with him is the 1947 Los tres GarcÃÂa where she also starred alongside Abel Salazar and VÃÂctor Manuel Mendoza, playing the role of their grandmother with a strong, naughty and authoritarian attitude.
GarcÃÂa continued working with Pardave and appeared with him in El ropavejero "The junkman" (1947) and in Azahares para tu boda "Orange blossoms for your wedding" (1950), which were her last jobs with him. Garcia's nature was also deeply irreverent, and she showed it in films like Doña Clarines (1951), in which she makes fun of her grandmother's character, something she repeated in Las señoritas Vivanco "The Misses Vivanco" (1959) and in El proceso de las señoritas Vivanco "The process of the Misses Vivanco" (1961), in both she acted with Prudencia Grifell and was directed by Mauricio de la Serna.
In that decade she worked in both film and television, appearing in multiple soap operas such as "A Face in the Past" (1960), "La gloria Quedo atrás" (1962), and "La Duchess" (1966), in which a lottery ticket seller wins the jackpot and uses that money to get her daughter back, whom she had given up to her millionaire in-laws in the past.
In that decade we also saw her in the pages of a comic-book adventure story entitled "Doña Sara, la mera mera", in which she was dressed as the character she had made famous in Los tres GarcÃÂa and Vuelven los GarcÃÂa. In the 1970s, her grandmother character took part in films such as "Fin de fiesta" (1972), by Mauricio Walerstein, and Luis Alcoriza's "Mecánica Nacional" (1972), in which she utters some of the most famous insults of our cinematography. They were still charming, because they emanated from the mouth that had represented so much of Mexico's moral society.
In the 70s she appeared as Nana Tomasita, who looked after Cristina (Graciela Mauri) in the long-running telenovela Mundo de juguete (1974) and as a meticulous old woman from the "Caridad" segment, directed by Jorge Fons, in "Faith, Hope and Charity."
GarcÃÂa had her own television show in 1951, Media hora con Abuelita, but it failed and was cancelled. She returned to television in 1960 when she obtained a role in Un rostro en el pasado which was her first of eight telenovelas. These included Mundo de juguete in 1974, which as of (early 2006) was the longest-running telenovela in history, and Viviana with LucÃÂa Méndez in 1978.
On 21 November 1980, Sara died at the National Medical Center in Mexico City at the age of 85, due to a cardiac arrest that arose from pneumonia.
GarcÃÂa was buried alongside her daughter in a mausoleum at the Panteón Español cemetery in Mexico City. While she was being buried, the song "Mi Cariñito" ("My Little Darling/Beloved One") was played. This song was the one that Pedro Infante sang to Sara several times. In particular, he sang it drunk and tearfully, as a lament after Sara's character died in the movie Vuelven Los Garcia (The Garcias Return). It is said that the song was sung at her funeral by Lucha Villa.
Although it was never openly confirmed by GarcÃÂa, it is claimed that she had a longtime romantic relationship with . After her death, Rosario was named her universal heir, remaining in possession of all her material assets and the house in which they lived together for years, which was located at Rebsamen No. 929, in the Colonia Del Valle, Mexico City, where she resided until her death on 5 April 1983. According to studies, they were forced to hide their status as a couple due to the social stigma of their time regarding homosexuality.
In Mexico, GarcÃÂa represented a grandmotherly figure due to her many roles as a grandmother in the movies she appeared in, and in 1973 she signed a commercial agreement to allow the chocolate company La Azteca use her image on Mexico's traditional Abuelita chocolate. La Azteca was later purchased by the Nestlé brand in 1995, who continued to use her image on the same brand.