“I am already a legend. And the legend continues. » Slight wink captured by the camera, an emerald green dress lined with sequins and crystals and four corpulent rings. On December 17, 2022, Mirtha Legrand, 95 – and 96 in February 2023 – presents her last show of the year, before the summer break. The host with a record career closes the season of her big return to television, every Saturday evening, after a forced parenthesis linked to the Covid-19 pandemic.
through the screens, “Mirtha”, as the Argentines call it, has accompanied the country for more than eighty years. Contemporary of all, it is the witness and the reflection of a large part of the history of Argentina, receiving all its celebrities, politicians, journalists, sportsmen or artists. “Mirtha represents tranquility: you turn on the TV and you know she is there. She has a form of magnetism. assesses Tomás Balmaceda, philosopher by training, author of a book on the 1990s.
The Golden Age of Argentinian Cinema
Before presiding, since 1968 (and with a few interruptions), its famous lunches, Mirtha Legrand, by her birth name Rosa María Juana Martínez, was first an actress. She begins at the age of 14 and embodies the golden age of Argentine cinema and its prolific production of the 1930s-1950s. It was at the dawn of her career that she met Daniel Tinayre, an Argentinian director born in France, seventeen years her senior, whose wife she would become. “He takes her out of the role of the ingenue and makes her evolve towards more serious and dramatic characters”, recalls Jorge Lafauci, a former cultural journalist.
Haughty eyebrows drawn in pencil, cascading blond curls, she symbolizes, even in her French-speaking pseudonym, the glamorous actress. His affinity with France earned him the Legion of Honor in November 2022, in Buenos Aires, a surprise, by his own admission. “You are a great actress, you have this theatrical, manipulative thing (…)a great provocateur, Mirtha”, says actress Moria Casán during a lunchtime show in 2015. The bittersweet compliment is accompanied by the host’s unfailing professional laugh.
“What is striking is this formula that has never changed: sit around a table and discuss the news. It’s a very Argentinian ritual, notes Tomás Balmaceda. But she never tried to claim to be a journalist: impartiality does not interest her. »
Mirtha is fundamentally conservative. Catholic, too, as she recalls. His favorite profile for an opposition candidacy for the October presidential election? Asked in September 2022, she answers without flinching ” [Patricia] Bullrich”, which embodies the rightmost wing.
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