Roberto Escalada

Roberto Escalada born Aldo Roberto Leggero (4 July 1914 – 5 December 1986 in Buenos Aires) was a major Argentine film actor and cinema icon of the classic era.

Roberto Escalada began his career working on the radio and it was his voice that caught the attention of producers. On meeting him, film producers pleased by his physical appearance immediately put him in as a member of different movie casts.

It was director Carlos Hugo Christensen who used Escalada to create a new masculine Latinamerican archetype in "Sapho, story of a passion", a melodramatic, film in which he starred as the lover of the older Mecha Ortiz and other films partnering Olga Zubarry.

One of his most acclaimed films of the 1940s was Los Pulpos or The octopuses in English a film also directed by Christensen.

In 1950 Escalada was chosen to play the central role of a Bioy Casares' short novel that in cinema was named "Mr Oribe's crime". Then in 1955 he played a conniving businessman in Ayer fue primavera ("Yesterday it was spring") in which he worked under the directorship of Fernando Ayala.

However his life changed at the beginning of the 1960s when he got married and start working on TV. As a heavy smoker he had some health concerns during the mid to late 1960s and he spent the later years of this life in television picking up a number of different roles some of them very small.

He made over 55 film and TV appearances in Argentina between 1939 and 1980.

His health declined further in the early 1980s and he died on 5 December 1986 of a smoking related heart attack aged 72 in Buenos Aires.

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