Mário Viegas, the actor who said Portugal's poems aloud, dies at 47

Mário Viegas died in Lisbon on Monday 1 April 1996. He was 47, and the cause was AIDS. In Portugal 1 April is the Dia das Mentiras, the day of lies. Mário Tomé, a former deputy of the far-left UDP, the party Viegas had campaigned for six months earlier, began a tribute with the date: Viegas had died on the day of lies, so needless to say he had not died, and never would.4 sources4 sources

In 1995 he had been on stage in Europa Não! Portugal Nunca!, a satire on the politics of the day that became his last hit. A sign at the front of the stage told the audience that nobody in the company had signed anything for the man calling himself Secretary of State for Culture. That year he also ran for parliament and announced that he would run for president, before he fell too ill to go on.3 sources3 sources

Many Portuguese knew him first as a voice. For three decades he recited poetry on records, in halls and on RTP, the public television channel, and the public often took him for the author of the poems he said. A doctoral thesis on poetry recordings in Portugal names him, with João Villaret, as one of the two actors who between them almost entirely dominated the art of saying poetry for half a century.3 sources3 sources

Viegas grew up in Santarém, a town on the Tagus north-east of Lisbon, in a family of pharmacists with a republican tradition. His mother, Mariana Lopes Viegas, taught Greek and Latin, and his maternal uncle António Cardoso Lopes had founded the children's comic O Mosquito. As a boy Viegas made paper puppets on strings and acted out his own stories with them.3 sources3 sources

Reciting was his way onto a stage. He told Simone de Oliveira on RTP that in Santarém poetry was the only way he could perform in public, and gave the date of his debut as 12 March 1966. He was 17. His first pieces were two poems by Alexandre O'Neill, among them “O Poema Pouco Original do Medo” (The Not Very Original Poem of Fear), a bold choice under the dictatorship.1 source1 source

He went to Lisbon to study history at the Faculty of Letters, then enrolled in the theatre school of the Conservatório Nacional. His professional debut came in 1968 at the Teatro Experimental de Cascais, under the director Carlos Avilez. In October 1968 he moved to Porto and joined the Teatro Universitário do Porto, returning to Cascais in 1970.4 sources4 sources

His months in Porto, in 1969, were the busiest of his “reciter-agitator” period, as he later called it. He said he gave hundreds of shows with José Afonso, Adriano Correia de Oliveira, Manuel Freire, the guitarist Carlos Paredes and others. In 2021 the family of a Vila Real doctor, Jorge Ginja, who had died the year before, made public tapes Viegas had recorded for him that year to take to the war in Angola: 40 poems, 29 of which he never recorded again, and two scenes from Gorky and Chekhov.2 sources2 sources

The regime caught up with him in 1971. By his own account he was sent to the army camp at Mafra on PIDE orders, to a basic training designed for students punished after the academic crisis of 1969. He was then posted to the army's psychological action service and the General Staff, until his police file arrived and an alarmed colonel moved him to harmless duties.1 source1 source

His first record, Mário Viegas diz poemas, came out on the Orfeu label in 1969. The second, Palavras Ditas (Spoken Words), in 1972, set out what he was trying to do. He told a joke, read a Jorge de Sena poem and ended with a melodramatic reading of a weather forecast. In the sleeve notes he wrote that the same tricks, the whispers, sobs and shouts of actors and demagogues, served for a poem by Camões, one by Herberto Helder or a recipe.1 source1 source

The critic José Jorge Letria wrote in 1972 that Viegas had drastically recast the art of declamation, with Brecht's lessons in mind. The thesis's author, José António Silva, calls it one of the most important poetry records ever made in Portugal. In 1973 Viegas put his voice beside a home recording that the poet Daniel Filipe, who had died in 1964, made of his “A Invenção do Amor” in 1953. Silva says it is the oldest recording of a poet's voice ever issued in Portugal.1 source1 source

Looking back on the agitator years of 1969, he said that afterwards everything changed: the reciter-agitator no longer seemed justified, and he began to care more about the quality of the texts. He still chose poems that were simple to hear and quickly understood, and on the sleeve of Pretextos para dizer in 1978 he put it bluntly.1 source1 source

His readings were slow. Silva timed three versions of Álvaro de Campos's long poem “Tabacaria” (Tobacco Shop), one of Pessoa's best known, and found that Viegas took half as long again as Villaret. Most of the difference lay in the silences. Viegas's pauses ran from a fraction of a beat to six beats, where Villaret's were almost all one or two, and Viegas spoke more slowly, at 67 beats a minute to Villaret's 80.1 source1 source

He saw the revolution of 25 April 1974 from the front row, he said: in the Largo do Carmo, and in the afternoon in Rua António Maria Cardoso, where a crowd shouting death to the PIDE came under fire. The São Luiz theatre has its main entrance in the same street. In May 1974 he was sent to the service set up to wind up the PIDE.2 sources2 sources

In 1975 he was among the actors, writers and musicians who met to set up A Barraca, a company that wanted popular, improvised theatre to provoke debate. Maria do Céu Guerra was among the first members, and the group gave its first show on 4 March 1976 at the Incrível Almadense, a club in Almada. There Viegas played the title role in Hélder Costa's D. João VI, and won a prize for it at the Sitges theatre festival in Spain in 1979.3 sources3 sources

Cinema came at the same time. His first film was Eduardo Geada's O Funeral do Patrão in 1975, and he was filming Artur Semedo's O Rei das Berlengas in Leiria on 25 November 1975, the day of that year's military coup. The film won him best actor at a European festival of comic cinema in A Coruña in 1978.3 sources3 sources

He became a favourite actor of the director José Fonseca e Costa, starring in Kilas, o Mau da Fita (dated 1980 in some accounts and 1981 in others) and later in Sem Sombra de Pecado and A Mulher do Próximo. He worked with Manoel de Oliveira on A Divina Comédia (1991) and beside Marcello Mastroianni in Roberto Faenza's Afirma Pereira (1996). He made more than 15 feature films in all.3 sources3 sources

As a director he staged Beckett, Chekhov, Strindberg, Pirandello, Eduardo De Filippo and Peter Shaffer. Sources agree that he founded three companies, the last being the Companhia Teatral do Chiado, set up with the younger actor Juvenal Garcês in 1990 by one account and 1991 by another. They do not agree on the other two. A 2006 Jornal de Notícias report names the Novo Grupo and the Grupo 4, while other accounts count him among the founders of A Barraca.4 sources4 sources

The awards followed the work. The Associação Portuguesa de Críticos de Teatro honoured him four times and the Casa da Imprensa twice, and the state's Secretariat for Culture gave him the Prémio Garrett in 1987. On 9 June 1994 he was made a Commander of the Order of Prince Henry, presented by President Mário Soares.4 sources4 sources

In the mid-1980s RTP gave him a series of his own, Palavras Ditas. RTP's own record dates it to 1984; the biography reproduced by Voz Online gives 1986. The first of its 12 programmes, “A dificuldade está na escolha” (the hard part is choosing), featured visual poems by E. M. de Melo e Castro and António Aragão, and the second was on Pessoa's Alberto Caeiro.4 sources4 sources

Later programmes were built around a theme or a poet: Camões with the singer Manuel Freire, poems by and about women, Eugénio de Andrade, and the humorist Mário-Henrique Leiria's Contos do Gin-Tonic, read with the broadcaster Manuela de Melo.2 sources2 sources

He brought in other actors, among them Eunice Muñoz, Carmen Dolores, Ruy de Carvalho and João Perry. The format was simple, with the camera close on his face. Not everyone liked the intensity of his delivery, and he once answered critics on air that some poems could only be said well that way.2 sources2 sources

The second series, Palavras Vivas, which RTP calls poetry for everyone, was a set of documentaries, mostly on a single writer each. One programme on Fernando Pessoa begins with Viegas sitting on the stairs of number 16 Rua Coelho da Rocha, where Pessoa lived. Others covered Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Camilo Pessanha, Cesário Verde, Almada Negreiros, António Aleixo and lesser-known figures such as Pedro Oom. RTP dates the series to 1991, as does Silva for the Pessoa programme with its long reading of “Tabacaria”; Voz Online gives 1990.4 sources4 sources

Two programmes went home to Santarém. One was on the poet Ruy Belo, born there like Viegas. The other, recorded in the Teatro Taborda, where RTP says Viegas had made his debut, was on three poets he had known: José Gomes Ferreira, the singer José Afonso and Raul de Carvalho.2 sources2 sources

By the 1990s his politics were aimed at the government of Aníbal Cavaco Silva, prime minister since 1985. He adapted Almada Negreiros's modernist Manifesto Anti-Dantas, putting Cavaco's name in place of the writer Júlio Dantas. The UDP's Mário Tomé recalled the cover he gave it, which rebranded the UDP as a union of poets, humorists, futurists, revolutionaries and good people.2 sources2 sources

Europa Não! Portugal Nunca!, staged by the Companhia Teatral do Chiado in 1995, was his last theatrical success. Tomé described it as an attack on the last gasps of Cavaco's government and on Pedro Santana Lopes, the Secretary of State for Culture it mocked from the stage.4 sources4 sources

For the general election of October 1995 he joined the UDP's list as an independent, third in line. In the same year he announced that he would stand for President of the Republic under the slogan “O Sonho ao Poder”, the dream to power, and found some support among Lisbon university students. His illness made it impossible to go to the polls.4 sources4 sources

He was also openly gay. The Lusa report on a 2015 photobiography says the book shows him as openly homosexual at a “difficult” time. Biographies give AIDS as the cause of his death.3 sources3 sources

Juvenal Garcês took over the Companhia Teatral do Chiado. Low after Viegas's death, he staged The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) in 1996, cheaply and on purpose, and it ran for years. The company's home was a studio theatre annexed to the São Luiz, the Teatro-Estúdio Mário Viegas, owned by Lisbon City Council.2 sources2 sources

Garcês lost that space after closures for building work and disputes with the council, and the company eventually dissolved; he died in 2020. The council's decision forced the removal of Viegas's papers, which belonged to the company. The room survives as the Sala Mário Viegas, the São Luiz's black box, with 102 seats.3 sources3 sources

The memorials came steadily. The Museu Nacional do Teatro showed his photographs and manuscripts in 2001, and the Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores showed them again in 2006, when Público issued his complete recordings. In 2003 the Centro Cultural Regional de Santarém created the Prémio Nacional de Poesia Actor Mário Viegas for unpublished poetry, though money troubles meant only four editions by 2018.3 sources3 sources

Other tributes followed. His “Auto-Photo Biografia (não autorizada)”, a scrapbook memoir he made before he died, was published by his sister. A photobiography, Sonho ao Poder, appeared in 2015, the 1969 tapes were being edited as an audiobook in 2021, and in late 2025 the Teatro Municipal Joaquim Benite in Almada showed photographs from the archive he gave the Museu Nacional do Teatro e da Dança.3 sources3 sources

His voice is easy to find. RTP keeps episodes of Palavras Ditas and Palavras Vivas online, among them the Pessoa programme that opens on the stairs of Rua Coelho da Rocha.2 sources2 sources

His manner of saying poetry also outlived him. Silva's thesis argues that Viegas, like Villaret, founded a “school” of reciting with many imitators, and that the two were alone in doing it everywhere at once: television, film, theatre, radio, recitals and records.1 source1 source