Gustavo Rodríguez | |
---|---|
Born |
Gustavo Álvaro Rodríguez February 19, 1947 Ciudad Bolívar, Bolívar, Venezuela |
Died | April 2, 2014 Caracas, Venezuela |
(aged 67)
Occupation | Actor |
Years active | 1973–2013 |
Employer |
RCTV Venevisión |
Gustavo Rodríguez (February 19, 1947 – April 2, 2014) was a Venezuelan film, stage and television actor.
Handsome, rugged, versatile and charismatic character actor Gustavo Rodríguez was born in Ciudad Bolívar, the capital city of Venezuela's southeastern Bolívar state.
Rodríguez initially became an avid film fan in his childhood days, as he often explained that Orson Welles' classic Citizen Kane (1941) made an especially strong impression on him as a young man.
In a career that spanned more than 40 years, Rodríguez was able to play the most dissimilar of characters, from royalist caudillo José Tomás Boves, tango singer Carlos Gardel, philosopher Karl Marx, and Venezuelan president Rómulo Betancourt, to the lead role in William Shakespeare's Hamlet and King Lear, while appearing in over more than 50 playwrights, 40 telenovelas and 18 films.
Following college graduation, Rodríguez moved to Caracas to attend Central University of Venezuela, where he acted in school plays before obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree. He was discovered by playwright and filmmaker Román Chalbaud at a drama camp. Chalbaud later cast him in his 1974 production Boves, el urogallo, a Radio Caracas Television drama starring Rodríguez and based on the novel of the same name by Francisco Herrera Luque.
In 1979 Rodríguez gained prominence in Estefanía, where he played the role of disgusting villain Pedro Escobar; a fictional character based on Pedro Estrada, notorious symbol of human rights abuse in Venezuela during the government of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. In the real life, Estrada was extremely repressive against critics of the regime and ruthlessly hunted down and imprisoned those who opposed the dictatorship.