Acclaimed Mexican actor Ana Ofelia Murguía has died. She was best known in the U.S. for voicing the elderly matriarch, Mama Coco, in the 2017 Disney Pixar film Coco. She was 90 years old.
The Mexican National Institute of Fine Arts announced her death on social media over the weekend.
As Mama Coco, Murguía voiced a woman who is losing her memory, grasping on to what little she remembers of her father. But the movie culminates in the big song, “Remember Me,” where her great-grandson helps her remember her father through music. “Remember Me” won that year’s Oscar for Best Original Song.
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Murguía was born in 1933. She made her on-stage debut in 1954 in Trial By Fire, a play based on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. From there she began a long career in acting that spanned decades, on stage, television, and in film. She was drawn to a wide variety of roles – from villains in noir films to dreamers in more sentimental movies. In 1978’s Naufragio, she plays a mother wishing for her son to come home. In Mi querido Tom Mix, she plays a grandmother adamant about her love for her favorite on-screen cowboy, Tom Mix.
She earned multiple awards for her work. In 2023, the National Autonomous University of Mexico gave her its Ingmar Bergman Medal for her acting. At the ceremony, fans and peers praised her long career. When it was Murguía’s turn to speak, she said that she was exhausted from all the attention. “Why me?” she asked. “Why for me?”
But she accepted the award graciously and told the crowd that if you work hard, there will be people who notice. “And that’s the marvelous thing,” she said.
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