Silvia Pinal, an award-winning actress who was considered one of the great stars of Mexico’s golden age of cinema, and who earned worldwide acclaim for her work with the groundbreaking Spanish-born Surrealist director Luis Buñuel, died on Nov. 28 in Mexico City.
Her death, in a hospital, was announced on social media by President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, who said that Ms. Pinal’s “cinematic and theatrical talent is part of Mexico’s cultural memory.” She was generally believed to be 93, although some news reports gave her age as 94.
A star of both stage and screen, the golden-haired Ms. Pinal, who collected more than 100 film and television credits in a career that began in the late 1940s, was known for balancing urbane glamour with saucy humor and sensuality.
The Mexican television network Las Estrellas posted on social media that she was her country’s “last diva.” She starred with celebrated leading men like Pedro Infante, the dashing screen idol and celebrated ranchera singer; Germán Valdés, known as Tin-Tan; and the comedy heavyweight Mario Morena, known as Cantinflas.
Ms. Pinal won her first of three competitive Ariel Awards — the Mexican equivalent of an Oscar — as best supporting actress for her performance in the 1952 film “Un Rincón Cerca del Cielo” (“A Corner Near Heaven”), which starred Mr. Infante as a poor man who encounters love and hardship after moving to Mexico City.
The award helped vault her to lead actress status, and she enhanced her budding stardom with a sultry performance in the 1955 thriller “Un Extraño en la Escalera” (“A Stranger on the Stairs”). The next year, she teamed with Mr. Infante again in the comedy “El Inocente” (“The Innocent”), in which she played a moneyed and capricious woman who takes up with an auto mechanic.
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