Lupe Ontiveros

Guadalupe Moreno was born in El Paso (Texas) on September 17, 1942. Her parents, Lucita Castañón and Juan Moreno, were fervent Catholic Mexican immigrants who, despite their lack of studies, had managed to get ahead and had become factory owners. of tortillas and two restaurants. Young Lupe graduated from El Paso High School, and later received a degree in Social Work from Texas Women’s University in Denton.

After marrying Elías Ontiveros, with whom she would have three children, she moved with him to California, where he intended to start a car sales business and she began to work as a social worker. But some time later, Lupe did not quite see her future job clearly, so she was considering going back to university and studying nursing. At that time, she found an ad in a newspaper asking for extras for a movie.

With the support of her husband, Lupe Ontiveros went to the casting and began to play small roles in various titles. She ended up becoming a secondary regular in TV series ( Charlie’s Angels , Eight is Enough , Hill Street Sad Song ) and films ( California Suite , The Border ). She began to be recognized after playing Rosalita in The Goonies , the Hispanic assistant of Mickey’s mother, who does not speak a word in English. Curiously, in the Spanish version she translated her name as Rosanna, and she converted it to Italian so that the sequence in which El Bocazas makes a translation would make sense.

Over the years, she continued to be very active in the cinema, in titles such as Under Another Flag , Universal Soldier and Better… Impossible . She gained enormous prominence, especially among the Latino community when she played the protagonist’s murderer in Selena , a biopic of an ill-fated singer who died at the hands of the president of her fan club. Her best work is undoubtedly the mother of América Ferrera’s character, a young Mexican emigrant who starts working in her sister’s textile workshop, while she decides what to do with her life, in Real Women they have curves

One of her last characters was Juanita, Gabrielle’s ( Eva Longoria ) hateful mother-in-law in Desperate Housewives . In the series, she found out that her daughter-in-law was unfaithful to her son, but before she could say anything, she was hit by a car.