Doña Rogelia is orphaned

2023-06-16 01:17:21

María del Carmen Martínez-Villaseñor Barrasa decided five years ago to leave everything to move to her paradise; this place was based in the Tenerife town of Puerto de la Cruz. In this transfer she was accompanied by her “children” of hers: Nícol, a purebred duck; Daisy, the talkative teenager; Rodolfo, the sensitive lion, and Doña Rogelia, the old curmudgeon. Four ‘young’ who launched her to stardom. She was never separated from them, although Mari Carmen had long since stopped acting consistently. This Thursday, the four were orphaned. Her ‘mother’ died at the age of 80 after a fall, apparently down the stairs, at her home.

Born in Cuenca (Horcajo de Santiago, 1943), she herself said that the world of theater and interpretation attracted her and it was ventriloquism that caught her. At the age of 14, she already knew that the puppet world was what she wanted to dedicate herself to professionally. She moved to Madrid where she met Natalio Rodríguez, ‘Talio’, father of José Luis Moreno, who recovered the world of puppets in Madrid after the civil war. Talio and Mari Carmen, who was barely twenty years old, toured all over Spain. Her teacher built her two first dolls for her: Daisy and Nícol. Manuel Meroño, a disciple of Rodríguez, was the architect of Rodolfo and Doña Rogelia.

Her numbers caught the attention of those responsible for Televisión Española, who invited her to participate in ‘Saturday Night’ in a timely manner in 1967. After taking her first steps in the cinema (‘La graduada’ with Lina Morgan and Florinda Chico and directed by Mariano Ozores in 1971), focused on television. She worked with Luis del Olmo in ‘Las seven thirty musical’ (1973), with Valerio Lazarov in ‘¡Señoras y señores!’ (1974-1975) and in ‘Aplauso’ (1970-1980) directed by José Luis Uríbarri.

In the image above, Mari Carmen with the duck Nícol, one of her best-known characters; below, the ventriloquist with Doña Rogelia, possibly the most famous of her stage ‘children’; and finally, the artist in one of her last appearances in public.

TVE, R. C. y E. P.

Mari Carmen also had problems in the medium that elevated her. For a while, she stopped working on television for bringing Rodolfo out of the closet in ‘Galas del sábado’. With hanger and everything. «Arouses tenderness and never borders on vulgarity. Those were different times and because of him I had to leave Spain », she confessed in an interview with El Correo six years ago, when several media outlets gave her up for dead. Her destiny was Venezuela and Mexico, where she triumphed with the most sensitive and good-natured feline.

“Good taste should never be lost. My children look for laughter without missing anyone, “said the ventriloquist, who assured that her dolls were” independent “and said what they wanted. “When I have the character in my hand, I unfold myself and already in his skin I correct the script,” she confessed. Nícol, her first creation, was the most difficult due to the complexity of her voice; and Doña Rogelia, the most ‘dangerous’. «She loves Macario very much. Sometimes he threatens me to go with Moreno (a friend of the artist) », she indicated without lack of humor.

The King and Julio Iglesias

In the eighties and nineties of the last century, Mari Carmen continued to appear constantly on variety shows on public television and on private newborns. She participated in ‘Saturday night’, ‘But what is this?’ and ‘Humor cinco estrellas’, the latter program on Telecinco. Between 1992 and 1993 she presented ‘Ay vida mía’, with the participation of Juan Manuel Parada who, after her, called her on numerous occasions as a guest of ‘Cinema de barrio’.

With the arrival of the new century, his television appearances were spaced out over time, although he did not stop acting in theaters. «I have been working for 64 years without taking a single year off. And I don’t stop », she assured in April in the Telecinco program ‘Deluxe’. He was writing two books about the “highlights” of his life. He also made a confession. Only two people have been able to touch his children: King Juan Carlos and Julio Iglesias. As for her private life, little information about her was known about her except her predilection for the Canary Islands. In 1980 she married Manuel Almazor, with whom she had a son a year later.