Libertad Lamarque: La Novia de América

Few voices carried the Argentine tango-canción farther than that of Libertad Lamarque, the cancionista and film star adored for generations across the Spanish-speaking world as "La Novia de América" — the Sweetheart of the Americas.^[1] Singing tangos, boleros and creole folk songs with a dramatic, emotionally direct delivery, she became one of the defining performers of the Golden Age of cinema in both Argentina and Mexico — the artist who carried the tango song off the Buenos Aires stage and onto the screen for audiences across Latin America.

A name meaning liberty

Lamarque was born Libertad Lamarque Bouza in Rosario, in Argentina's Santa Fe Province, on 24 November 1908. Her father, Gaudencio Lamarque, an Uruguayan of French descent and a committed anarchist, was imprisoned for political dissent at the time of her birth and chose the name Libertad — "liberty" — while pleading for his release; her mother, Josefa Bouza, was a widow of Spanish origin.^[1]

Into the tango song

A performer from childhood, Lamarque won first prize in a stage competition at the age of seven and toured nearby towns with a troupe of street singers, then took her first professional role in 1923 in the stage show Madre Tierra. The following year she moved to Buenos Aires — the capital of tango — where she worked as a professional singer, cut her first tango records, and built her name on canciones such as "Madreselva" and "Besos brujos."^[1]

Stage and screen

In 1933 Lamarque appeared in Tango!, the first Argentine sound film, launching a parallel career on screen that would run alongside her singing for decades.^[1] Through the 1930s and 1940s she ranked among the biggest names in an Argentine popular culture dominated by tango and a fast-growing film industry, admired equally as a dramatic actress and as a singer of tangos, boleros and folk songs.^[1]

Mexico and the golden age abroad

A famous on-set clash with the rising Eva Duarte — the future Eva "Evita" Perón — is often credited with prompting Lamarque's departure for Mexico in 1947, where she became one of the leading figures of that country's own cinematic golden age and even appeared in a film by Luis Buñuel.^[1] Her Mexican output ranged across musical dramas such as the 1961 Bello recuerdo (Lovely Memory), in which she starred alongside the child singer Joselito and the veteran Sara García.

Why it matters

Lamarque's career was among the longest and most prolific in the history of Latin American entertainment: by her death she had made some sixty-five films — most in Mexico, the rest in Argentina and one in Spain — appeared in telenovelas, and recorded more than eight hundred songs.^[1] She also helped shape the tango world around her; in 1935 it was Lamarque who gave the gaucho-costumed cancionista Azucena Maizani her lasting nickname, La Ñata Gaucha. A peer of figures like Tita Merello, she carried the tango song from the Buenos Aires stage to film audiences across two countries and remained beloved until her death in Mexico in 2000.^[2]