Amélia Rey Colaço, the actress who ran Portugal's national theatre

On 17 November 1917 a nineteen-year-old walked onto the stage of the Teatro República in Lisbon with bare feet. Actresses of the time wore stockings to suggest bare skin. Amélia Rey Colaço had worked on her part, the ragged village girl Marianela, with photographs her sister Alice took of her in their parents' garden, and she went without.1 source1 source

The play, a Spanish adaptation of a novel by Benito Pérez Galdós, had been chosen by her father. He wanted his daughter to prove herself in a part with no feathers or finery to hide behind: “a little girl of the people, barefoot, ragged, even somewhat misshapen, but with a great soul”, as he put it. The whole production was built around her, which almost never happened to a beginner.1 source1 source

The critics were won over. The newspaper República called her “born an actress, as one is born a musician”. Just over two weeks later the illustrated weekly Ilustração Portuguesa put her face on its cover.2 sources2 sources

That debut began a career of almost seven decades. For 45 of those years the company she founded with her husband held the concession of Portugal's national theatre, the longest in the theatre's history, and most of that time fell under the Estado Novo dictatorship.3 sources3 sources

Amélia Schmidt Lafourcade Rey Colaço was born in Lisbon on 2 March 1898. Her father, Alexandre Rey Colaço, was a concert pianist born in Tangier in 1854 to a Portuguese mother and a French father. He had trained in Madrid, Paris and Berlin, and he was piano teacher to Manuel II, Portugal's last king.2 sources2 sources

Her mother, Alice Lafourcade Schmidt, was born in Chile in 1865 and grew up in Berlin, where her own mother, known as Madame Kirsinger, kept a salon for musicians and artists. Alexandre met Alice there. They settled in Lisbon, and their house in the Rua Ribeiro Sanches became a salon in its turn, visited by the poet Afonso Lopes Vieira, the architect Raul Lino, the composer Vianna da Mota and the actors João and Augusto Rosa.1 source1 source

All four daughters learned music. At about thirteen Amélia went to Berlin to study the violin, travelling with her sister Maria, who had a state grant to study the piano. They lived with their grandmother, on whose advice Amélia went to Max Reinhardt's productions at the Deutsches Theater. Those evenings decided her to become an actress.2 sources2 sources

For a girl of the Lisbon upper class this was an odd choice. Music was a respectable art; the stage was not. Her father, by her own account, reacted with “astonishment” and “perplexity” but never “scandal”. He asked his friend Augusto Rosa, a star of the national theatre in the 1880s and 1890s, to judge whether she had talent.1 source1 source

Rosa took her on. He was strict, and he trained out of her the drawing-room style of reciting that young ladies learned at parties. She called him her “mestre”, her master, for the rest of her life.1 source1 source

Playing opposite her in Marianela was another of Rosa's pupils, Felisberto Robles Monteiro, born in 1888 in São Vicente da Beira, near Castelo Branco. He had studied at a seminary for the priesthood until the Bishop of Beja, after seeing him in a school play, advised him to follow his talent for the stage. He courted Amélia; she was cool towards him at first.1 source1 source

Augusto Rosa died in 1918 and the República's company broke up. Amélia and Robles Monteiro both joined Lucinda Simões's company at the Teatro do Ginásio. Her contract let her turn down any part that might harm her reputation, and her father insisted that a maid go with her to rehearsals.1 source1 source

The clause was soon tested. In the comedy Divorçons her parents refused to let her sit on Robles Monteiro's lap, which only fed the gossip about the two of them. She called it her “only theatrical scandal” and left for Madrid, where she took a theatre course at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, the liberal school her father had once attended.1 source1 source

She came back in 1920, engaged to Robles Monteiro, and they married that December. Both joined the Sociedade Artística, the society of actors then running the national theatre on the Rossio. Since the republic of 1910 it had been called the Teatro Nacional Almeida Garrett; it took back the name of Queen Maria II in 1939.3 sources3 sources

There, in 1921, she created the title role in Zilda, the first play by Alfredo Cortez to reach the stage. Critics argued about the play's morals but agreed about her acting, and it ran for 42 performances. It also deepened the quarrels inside the society.2 sources2 sources

The couple soon left to start their own company. They borrowed sixteen contos de réis and recruited António Pinheiro, the director who had staged Zilda. The Companhia Rey Colaço-Robles Monteiro gave its first performance on 18 June 1921 at the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, Lisbon's opera house, with Zilda.2 sources2 sources

The work was split. Robles Monteiro ran rehearsals and the business with a reputation for rigour; Amélia Rey Colaço made the sets and costumes an attraction in themselves, sometimes borrowing paintings and crystal from her parents' house. They chose the plays together, she said, though a caricature of 1926 shows her at the oars of a boat with a cautious Robles Monteiro as her passenger.1 source1 source

For eight years they played in rented theatres. They staged light comedies to pay the bills and riskier work in between: O Lodo, Cortez's drama of prostitution in the Mouraria, in which she played a prostitute; Oscar Wilde's Salomé in 1926, when it was still banned on English stages; and a Portuguese cycle of Gil Vicente and António Ferreira's Castro at the Trindade in 1928.1 source1 source

The young company was built on established stars such as Ângela Pinto and Palmira Bastos, who rejoined for good in 1931, but it also gave first parts to beginners. Maria Lalande made her debut there at fourteen and stayed sixteen years. Later came João Villaret, Paiva Raposo, Lourdes Norberto, Eunice Muñoz and João Perry.1 source1 source

In 1929 the state put the national theatre out to tender again. The terms were harsh. The building was run down, and the winner had to carry out within weeks the repairs that the state had left undone, then rewire the house and rebuild the auditorium over the following year. The Rey Colaço-Robles Monteiro company was the only bidder.1 source1 source

The concession was granted on 4 December 1929. Nineteen days later, on 23 December, the theatre reopened after a refit that cost the company 800 contos (800,000 escudos). On the first night actors were still carrying in furniture lent by friends while Robles Monteiro, already in wig and Louis XVI costume, set the stage with sweat running down his face. The boxes were cleaned with the audience waiting in the foyer.3 sources3 sources

The press praised the restored house, and about eighteen months later the government eased the financial terms. The state reopened the tender only twice before 1974, in 1952 and 1958, and both times kept the company. In 1958 its only rival was the Teatro d'Arte de Lisboa.1 source1 source

At the Rossio the company revived the Portuguese classics, above all Gil Vicente, whose plays had been left to drama students, as well as Camões, Garrett and António José da Silva, and put on Schiller, Molière, Goldoni and Shakespeare. Few living Portuguese playwrights went unstaged, among them Alfredo Cortez, José Régio, Luís de Sttau Monteiro, Bernardo Santareno and Luiz Francisco Rebello. In the open air it played A Midsummer Night's Dream in Palhavã park in 1941 and Castro in front of the monastery at Alcobaça, to 6,000 people.3 sources3 sources

As the national company it had a censor of its own. Other companies sent their plays to the state's censorship commission. At the Nacional the final word lay with the government commissioner, usually a man of letters, who could cut or ban a play.2 sources2 sources

That could work either way. The commissioner let the company open A Locomotiva in 1968, a play the censorship commission later banned when it was submitted for a run in Porto. In the other direction, José Régio's A Salvação do Mundo stayed banned at the Nacional from 1954, although students played it in 1956 and another company staged it at the São Luiz in 1971.1 source1 source

Amélia Rey Colaço was conservative in her habits and kept her politics to herself, as her father had done. She used charm and connections. When the commissioner banned Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit, she went to Cardinal Cerejeira, the Patriarch of Lisbon, argued for the play's morals and won his support. It became one of the company's big successes.1 source1 source

Other battles she lost. She asked again and again to stage Brecht's Mother Courage and Luís de Sttau Monteiro's Felizmente há luar!, and was refused each time. O Motim, a play about a revolt in eighteenth-century Porto, was banned too, along with a large share of the modern plays she wanted.2 sources2 sources

Politics reached the cast as well. In 1946 her daughter Mariana Rey Monteiro made her debut as Antigone, with Maria Barroso, a young actress from a family of opposition democrats, as her sister Ismene. Barroso later played in the company's staging of Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba.2 sources2 sources

The political police, the PIDE, questioned Barroso for days over her opposition work, and in the end a dismayed Amélia Rey Colaço told her she could not stay. Barroso's foundation dates the ban to 1948; a 2025 study puts it in 1946. Amélia Rey Colaço tried several times to bring her back, and the two remained close friends.4 sources4 sources

Some modern American drama did get through. On 3 May 1963 the company opened Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire at the D. Maria II, in a translation by António Quadros, directed by Henriette Morineau, with Mariana Rey Monteiro, Varela Silva, José de Castro and Lourdes Norberto. The historian Eugénia Vasques found no file on it in the surviving archive of the censorship commission.1 source1 source

Robles Monteiro fell ill in 1958 and died that November. Their daughter Mariana, widowed the same year, stood by her mother. Amélia Rey Colaço kept the company going, handing much of the directing to Pedro Lemos and the design to Lucien Donnat, who had made almost all its sets and costumes since the 1940s, and took over the management herself with a hired administrator.1 source1 source

In the early hours of 2 December 1964, during the run of Macbeth, fire gutted the theatre on the Rossio, and the company lost its whole wardrobe and its sets. That night has its own article on this site. After 35 years in the building, she missed above all her dressing room.3 sources3 sources

The government kept the contract alive. Two weeks after the fire the company played Macbeth again at the Coliseu dos Recreios, in everyday clothes against black curtains. To keep up the concession she sublet the Teatro Avenida and spent the insurance money on doing it up. Leal puts that money at 1,200 contos; Nuno Costa Moura, in a history of the Avenida, says about 1,000 contos went on the work, almost all of a payout that fell short of what the fire had destroyed.2 sources2 sources

The Avenida reopened on 6 February 1965 with O Motim, a play about the 1757 revolt in Porto over the wine trade, which was already in rehearsal when the Rossio burned. President Américo Thomaz attended. The audience cheered and saw the 1960s in it, and within days the play was banned and the police shut the doors.2 sources2 sources

In December 1967 the Avenida burned too. The company moved on to the Capitólio, then shared the Trindade with an operetta company. It kept staging Gil Vicente and new foreign writers, balanced by light shows to pay the bills, but audiences booed more and more. Leal suggests the anger fell on the company perhaps because it could not be aimed at the government.2 sources2 sources

Early in 1974 she took the company to the São Luiz, the old Teatro República where she had made her debut. On 22 April she wrote to President Thomaz that it faced insolvency. Three days later the Carnation Revolution overthrew the regime.2 sources2 sources

She tried to revive O Motim as an act of justice to its author, but threats of boycotts and of damage to the theatre made her give up. She closed the company, 53 years after it began, with debts she could not pay. One account dates its dissolution to a month after the revolution; the RTP documentary says it was formally wound up only in 1988.3 sources3 sources

In the new Portugal she was cast aside as a symbol of the old regime. Leal writes that she could find no work in the theatre and could not pay off her loans. In 1976 the secretary of state for culture, the poet David Mourão-Ferreira, asked the cabinet in vain to help her.1 source1 source

Lisbon's street-names office records that from 1978 to 1980 she directed a Companhia de Teatro Popular at the São Luiz, appointed by a later secretary of state for culture, António Reis. Leal does not mention it.2 sources2 sources

Help also came from Manuela Eanes and from her old friend Maria Barroso, by then the wife of the Socialist leader Mário Soares, who found her work. She backed the creation of the Museu do Teatro, set up in Lisbon in 1982, and gave it her books. In 1985, at 87, she played her last great role, Queen Catarina in José Régio's El-Rei Sebastião. She auctioned her possessions to leave her daughter some security and died in Lisbon on 8 July 1990, aged 92.4 sources4 sources

Her company's time at the national theatre is counted in different ways, and the round numbers in circulation do not agree. The difference lies in whether you count the years in the building or the years of the contract.3 sources3 sources

Her standing is easier to measure in people. Her company launched young actors such as Eunice Muñoz, Carmen Dolores, Maria Barroso, João Perry, Rogério Paulo and Ruy de Carvalho. When Mother Courage was finally staged in 1986, as a co-production between the national theatre and the Novo Grupo/Teatro Aberto, the title role went to Eunice Muñoz.3 sources3 sources

Her reputation has recovered. A month after her death Lisbon named a street in Benfica after her. In 2018 the national theatre marked her 120th birthday with an exhibition, simply titled Amélia, and RTP has shown a 2020 documentary about her, A Senhora Dona Amélia. Leal's verdict is that someone more openly political could hardly have kept the national theatre under the dictatorship, and that her diplomacy broke some of the rules, though not as many as one might wish.4 sources4 sources