Sara García

Photograph of the house where García was born at Orizaba, Veracruz

Sara García Hidalgo was born on 8 September 1895 at Orizaba Veracruz.[1][5] Her parents were Andalusian, Isidoro García Ruiz, an architect, and his wife Felipa Hidalgo de Ruiz in 1895.[2] Her father was hired for various jobs in Veracruz, where they arrived, having just come from Havana, Cuba.[5] Sarita was the only survivor of their eleven children.[6]

In 1900, a storm caused the Santa Catarina river (which separated the family house from Sara's school) to overflow and knock down the bridge that crossed it. Until the evening the children of the school could return from the other side of the river.[2] The anguish of Don Isidoro for believing that he would lose his only daughter caused him to suffer a stroke days later. Doña Felipa decided to sell her business a papier-mâché factory and travel to Mexico City to intern her husband into the Sociedad de Beneficencia Española de México (Spanish Welfare Society of Mexico), but he died shortly after arriving.[2][5] However her mother was contracted as the housekeeper.[5]

At age 9, Sara entered the prestigious Las Vizcaínas school as an intern.[2][5] In 1905 a typhus epidemic invaded Mexico, Sara became infected and infected her mother Felipa, who died.[2][5] She remained under the charge of the director of the institution, Cecilia Mallet,[2] and her good behavior and excellent grades allowed García to stayed in school. The director of Las Vizcaínas noticed her great sensitivity and artistic inclination and directed her into painting.[5] She also became a teacher and during her class she used to make her students performed plays.[2]

Sara started her film career at age 22 when she was still a teacher.[2] One day she decided to stroll by the Alameda and discovered the newly founded Azteca Films studios.[5] She came in with curiosity and was fascinated by everything she saw. From that moment she thought that she could also act, even if it was in the theater.[5] One day, watching Mimi Derba filming, the first Mexican film diva, an actor and official of Azteca Films caught her curiosity and invited her to participate in what would be her first film En defensa Propia "In self-defense" (1917).[5] Then she went to the theater where she started making small roles.[5] Her diction and voice gave her prestige and she became part of the most outstanding companies of the moment: Mercedes Navarro, Prudencia Grifell and the sisters Anita and Isabelita Blanch.[5] In one of her tours throughout the Mexican Republic, she met Fernando Ibáñez, whom she had seen during the filming of "La soñadora" (1917).[5]

García under her grandma persona in the film La abuelita (1942)

In 1918, she married Fernando Ibáñez[2] and traveled throughout the country and Central America, until at a stop in Tepic, she gave birth to a girl, whom they named Fernanda Mercedes Ibáñez García.[5] Sara had to dedicate time and take care of her daughter. Her absence bothered Fernando, who began to get involved in several adventures, then became entangled with the head of the company.[5] Sara divorced her husband and left with her daughter.[5] Years later her ex-husband returned home sick. Sara paid for his expenses and cared for him until his death in 1932.[5] 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.[5] Outside the sets, he courted her with Sara's disapproval. The romance ended abruptly and the following year (1938) Fernanda married the engineer Mariano Velasco Mújica, leaving to live in Ciudad Valles, Tamaulipas.[5] A little more than two years later Fernanda became ill with typhoid fever and died on October 17, 1940. Due to her strong personality Sara survived her daughter 40 years.[5]

García would later continue her extensive career in film and sacrificed her beauty when she decided, at the age of 30, to have her teeth removed so that her mouth would look like that of an older woman and thus be able to star in roles of self-sacrificing ladies and achieve personify the role they gave her.[6]

Film actress Emma Roldán suggested Sara García for the role of doña Panchita, an old woman, in the 1940 film Allá en el trópico ("There in the Tropics").[5] The film's director Fernando de Fuentes considered that García was too young for the part (indeed she was in her mid 40s) but Roldán replied him saying "Sara is an actress, and actresses don't have an age".[5] For the screen test, Sara García had a wig made for her. At the time of the screen test, the director asked the crew of her whereabouts and 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.[5] It is in Fernando de Fuentes' Allá en el trópico where Sara García won her title of la Abuelita de México (Mexico's Grandmother).[5]

In 1942, Sara García co-starred with Joaquín Pardavé in El baisano Jalil, a comedy film where she portrayed the wife of a Lebanese-immigrant family, one of the marginalized communities settled in the La Lagunilla neighborhood, when they arrived in Mexico City.[7] She starred again with Pardavé in a similar comedy, El barchante Neguib (1945).[7]

She started a long series of films co-starring with the brightest stars of the cinema of Mexico, such as Cantinflas, Jorge Negrete, Germán Valdés "Tin-Tan".[8]

She co-starred many times in films as the grandmother of famous Mexican actor Pedro Infante. Her most remembered film with him is the 1947 Los tres García where she also starred alongside Abel Salazar and Víctor Manuel Mendoza, playing the role of their grandmother with a strong, naughty and authoritarian attitude.[9][10]

García continued working with Pardave and appeared with him on El ropavejero "The junkman" (1947) and in Azahares para tu boda "Orange blossoms for your wedding" (1950), which were her last jobs with him.[11] 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), both in which she acted along with Prudencia Grifell and were directed by Mauricio de la Serna.[11]

In that decade she combined her work between film and television, appearing in multiple soap operas such as A Face in the Past (1960), La gloria Quedo atrás (1962), 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 García and Vuelven los García. 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, but that had their charm emanating from that mouth that had represented so much for the moral society of Mexico.

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.