Violeta Montenegro (Paraná, July 13, 1938) is an Argentine actress, dancer, choreographer and vedette who notably ventured into theatre, film and television.
Career
With exotic beauty, strongly marked features and clear eyes, Violeta Montenegro knew how to leave her mark on the stages of most of the famous theatres of the time, such as Maipo, Tabarís, Astros and El Nacional, up to the famous Corrientes Street. She started on the stage with her sister, the dancer Olga Montenegro, who also did Revistas in Maipo, Nacional and Cómico.
Violeta worked alongside great comic bosses such as Don Pelele, Alberto Olmedo, Osvaldo Pacheco and Javier Portales. Still, it was with José Marrone and Adolfo Stray’s Revista Buenos Aires al verde vivo (1972) that she fulfilled the first star role.
Being very young, she was hired as a prima ballerina by the businessman Joaquín Gassa. Until then, she only knew how to dance classical, but when she arrived in Europe, she studied modern arts. After the coup d’état that began the Aramburu dictatorship, she was exiled from Argentina in 1958. There, she triumphed as a prima ballerina in Italy, staying for a year in Milan. She then ventured into foreign cinema by working as a dancer in the film Europa de Notte. She succeeded as a dancer in Los Angeles (United States), along with leading figures such as Elizabeth Taylor, who made the film Cleopatra in 1961, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.1She worked as a star absolute at the Olympia Theater in Paris for four months.
After years of absence, she returned to Argentina to participate in the program Almorzando con Mirtha Legrand as a special guest in 1980 to give a conversation about the so-called “Guerra de las Vedettes”.
In the 1980s, she won a lawsuit against the vedette Susana Giménez (b. 1944), who commented that the show that Montenegro performed in a Revista theatre was a “pornographic show.”
Her last performance in the country was in 1992 in Villa Carlos Paz (province of Córdoba).
Since the 1990s, established in Benidorm (Spain), she has been dedicated to teaching dance and directing groups of adult people who find another meaning in life through the stage. That is why the mayor of Benidorm decorated her for her social work since her staging has charitable purposes such as raising funds for the fight against Alzheimer’s disease and other diseases.
She was married for many years to the actor and dancer Fernando Reyna, whom she met on her tour of Europe, with whom they had her daughter, Alejandra Montenegro, also an artist.
