Eunice Muñoz, the actress who spent eighty years on stage, dies at 93

The performance was billed for four in the afternoon of 28 November 2021 at the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, on Lisbon's Rossio. On stage were two women playing one: Mrs Rasch, a woman going through another evening identical to all the others, in a play by the German writer Franz Xaver Kroetz that has no dialogue and no monologue. The older Mrs Rasch was Eunice Muñoz, aged 93. The younger was her granddaughter, Lídia Muñoz.2 sources2 sources

The date had been chosen. Muñoz had first acted on that stage 80 years earlier, aged 13, and A Margem do Tempo (The Margin of Time) was billed as her farewell. In the audience were the prime minister, António Costa, the mayor of Lisbon, Carlos Moedas, and the culture minister, Graça Fonseca.3 sources3 sources

When it was over, Muñoz spoke. She thanked her grandmother Augusta, from whom she believed she had her talent, her parents, and her teacher Amélia Rey Colaço. Costa, who had told reporters on arriving that she was saying goodbye at 93 on the stage where she had begun at 13, went up to thank her for all she had done for the theatre. Fonseca read a poem by Eugénio de Andrade that, she said, Muñoz liked to recite.1 source1 source

Four and a half months later, on Friday 15 April 2022, she died at the Hospital de Santa Cruz, her son told the Lusa news agency. The national theatre wrote that day that there was a before and an after Eunice, in its own house and in Portuguese theatre.2 sources2 sources

Eunice do Carmo Muñoz was born on 30 July 1928 in Amareleja, a small town in the municipality of Moura, in the Alentejo. The street where she was born now carries her name.3 sources3 sources

Her family had been performers for three generations: the Spanish Muñoz family on the stage and the Sicilian Cardinali family in the circus on her father's side, the Campos Carmo family on her mother's. They toured the Alentejo and the Ribatejo with a theatre they put up and took down in each town, the Troupe Carmo, in which her grandparents and aunts also played.3 sources3 sources

From the age of five she sang popular hits of the 1930s in the troupe's shows. She was shy, and later told interviewers that she would invent stomach aches to avoid the faces staring up at her. The family settled in Lisbon in the 1930s: in 1934, by the Lusa agency's account, or when she was 11, by the Cinemateca's.4 sources4 sources

Somebody noticed the girl from the travelling troupe. On 28 November 1941 she made her professional debut in Vendaval (Gale), a play by Virgínia Vitorino, directed by Rey Colaço and Robles Monteiro. She played Isabel, on a stage shared with Palmira Bastos, Amélia Rey Colaço, Maria Lalande, Lucília Simões, Raul de Carvalho, Alves da Cunha and João Villaret.2 sources2 sources

The theatre and most obituaries give 28 November, the date celebrated in 2021. The Cinemateca's programme note and Lusa's reports of the farewell give 29 November.4 sources4 sources

She was taken into the company and played 21 plays at the D. Maria II between 1941 and 1944. Rey Colaço became the teacher she always called “Senhora D. Amélia”. At the same time she studied at the Conservatório, the national drama school, and finished with a mark of 18 out of 20.2 sources2 sources

She moved quickly beyond it. In 1943 she sang in her first operetta, O João Ratão, at the Teatro Avenida, opposite the comic actor Estêvão Amarante. In 1945 Maria Matos directed her, and that year Margaret Mayo's Chuva de Filhos at the Teatro Variedades, with Vasco Santana and Mirita Casimiro, made her widely popular.1 source1 source

Film followed. In 1946 she played Beatriz in Leitão de Barros's Camões, a costume drama about the national poet, and won the best actress prize of the SNI, the regime's propaganda and information office. Around the same time Henrique Campos cast her in Um Homem do Ribatejo.3 sources3 sources

At 18 she married the architect Rui Couto and had a daughter. She went on working: comedies such as Melchior Lengyel's Ninotchka in 1950, then António Pedro's company at the Teatro do Ginásio, and the Trindade.2 sources2 sources

Then, in her early twenties, she stopped. She wanted time for her family and to think about her life. She took a job in a cork shop in the Príncipe Real, where fans who could no longer see her on stage came to look at her behind the counter, until she found it unbearable. She took a secretarial course and worked at an electrical goods firm in Barreiro, across the Tagus, where she met her second husband.2 sources2 sources

He encouraged her to go back. The impresario Vasco Morgado cast her as Joan of Arc in Jean Anouilh's play at the Teatro Avenida, and it was a hit; Lusa dates this return to 1955, the Diário de Notícias to 1956. In 1957 she played Pirandello's A Desaparecida, and soon after she joined Francisco Ribeiro's Teatro Nacional Popular, where she played Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Portuguese plays such as Júlio Dantas's Um Serão nas Laranjeiras.2 sources2 sources

The 1960s brought several of the parts she is best remembered for. She shared the best actress prize of 1963 with Laura Alves for William Gibson's The Miracle Worker, about the teacher Anne Sullivan. At Raul Solnado's new Teatro Villaret she played Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke in 1965 and Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes in 1966. In 1967 Carlos Avilez, of the Teatro Experimental de Cascais, directed her as Racine's Phèdre, and in 1972, in Cascais, the Argentine director Victor Garcia cast her in Genet's The Maids.3 sources3 sources

In 1970 she set up her own small company, Somos Dois, and directed for the first time: Jean Cocteau's La Voix humaine, which she took on tour to Angola and Mozambique, then Portuguese colonies, with comedies by William Gibson and Murray Schisgal. About a year later, back in Lisbon, she was due to open in A Mãe by the Polish writer Stanisław Witkiewicz at the Teatro São Luiz. A few hours before the premiere, the censors banned it.1 source1 source

The dictatorship covered 33 years of her working life, from her debut to the revolution of 25 April 1974. Asked about it in 2011, she said that the only complaint she had about her life in the theatre was the repertoire the censors had stolen.1 source1 source

Her example was Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, which she could play only in 1986. From 1972 to 1976 she was away from the stage again, doing small television jobs and recording Portuguese writers such as the poet Florbela Espanca.1 source1 source

She came back in 1976 with Peter Shaffer's Equus. Fire had gutted the D. Maria II in 1964, and when the rebuilt theatre reopened in 1978 she was on its stage that year, in Luís de Sttau Monteiro's Felizmente Há Luar!, a play the censors had banned. Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba followed there in 1983, then Raul Brandão's O Gebo e a Sombra and Valle-Inclán's Romance de Lobos.2 sources2 sources

Mother Courage finally came in 1986, at the Teatro Aberto. João Lourenço directed it for his company, the Novo Grupo, in a co-production with the national theatre, and Muñoz played the title role. Nuno Teixeira made a film of the production the following year.3 sources3 sources

Of the directors she worked with, she named as her masters Ribeirinho, Avilez, João Perry, João Lourenço, João Mota and Ricardo Pais. In 1991 she was one of the leads of Filipe La Féria's musical Passa por Mim no Rossio at the D. Maria II, playing Estêvão Amarante, her partner of 1943.2 sources2 sources

Late in her career she took on a long monologue. At 82 she learned Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, a monologue, for Diogo Infante at the D. Maria II. Asked how she did it, she said it was her job: she had to know the text and cry when the director told her to. “I am a very obedient actress,” she said.1 source1 source

Cinema came back to her late. Jorge Leitão Ramos singled out her Dona Estefânia in Lauro António's Manhã Submersa and her caricatural housekeeper in João Botelho's Tempos Difíceis. She also worked with Manuel Guimarães, Manoel de Oliveira, Paulo Rocha and Fernando Lopes. Her last film was Diogo Infante's short Olga Drummond.3 sources3 sources

Television made her a household face. In 1993 she played the lead in A Banqueira do Povo (The People's Banker), a telenovela directed by Walter Avancini, and from then on she was rarely off the screen. Other telenovelas followed, among them Olhos de Água, Mistura Fina, Ilha dos Amores and Destinos Cruzados, and the series made from Miguel Sousa Tavares's novel Equador. In all, her name is attached to more than 80 films, telenovelas and comedy programmes.3 sources3 sources

In 2011, for her 70 years on stage, Carlos Avilez directed her as Flora Goforth, a rich former variety star, in Tennessee Williams's The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore with the Teatro Experimental de Cascais. When the production moved to the D. Maria II in 2012, she fell during rehearsals, broke both wrists and injured her neck, and the run was cancelled. She did not act again for nine years.2 sources2 sources

Falls and a thyroid tumour weakened her. In 2016 Filipe La Féria announced her for As Árvores Morrem de Pé, but in October her family withdrew her from the cast on health grounds. She went to the theatre as a spectator instead, usually with her granddaughter Lídia, who had worked in theatre as a prompter and assistant director.3 sources3 sources

Finding the play was hard, Lídia said: they wanted a text her grandmother had never done in 80 years and that would challenge her. Kroetz wrote it for one actress, as one long stage direction with neither dialogue nor monologue; the director Sérgio Moura Afonso split the woman between the two of them. It opened in April 2021 at the Auditório Eunice Muñoz in Oeiras, toured the country, played nine nights at the D. Maria II in September and closed there on 28 November.3 sources3 sources

The news broke on Friday 15 April 2022. The president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, said he was deeply distressed by the death of “a national reference” and thanked her, on behalf of all the Portuguese, for unforgettable decades. The culture ministry announced a day of national mourning on the day of the funeral.2 sources2 sources

The president, on a visit to the Azores, said he would sign the decree at the airport. Asked whether she should be moved to the National Pantheon, he declined to comment, saying it was a matter for parliament. Her body lay in the Basílica da Estrela in Lisbon on 18 and 19 April; after a funeral mass on the 19th she was cremated at the Alto de São João cemetery.2 sources2 sources

On 22 April the Assembleia da República approved, unanimously, a vote of sorrow presented by its president, Augusto Santos Silva, with members of her family in the gallery. It called her the leading figure of Portuguese theatre of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The same day Lisbon city council voted to give her name to a street or cultural building.2 sources2 sources

Even the size of her career is disputed. Lusa's obituary, repeated in reports of parliament's vote, cites more than 120 plays with nearly 30 companies, from the database of the University of Lisbon's theatre studies centre. Observador, citing the same database, wrote of close to two hundred plays and about a hundred companies.3 sources3 sources

Her name is now on buildings and programmes. Oeiras named its municipal auditorium after her while she was alive. The national theatre's touring network, which takes its productions to towns where theatre is scarce, is called the Rede Eunice, and she was its patron. In October 2021 Amareleja opened a Casa da Memória in her honour, with her help and that of the national theatre museum.3 sources3 sources

She also handed the work on. A Margem do Tempo was, in her own words, the passing of the baton to her granddaughter, in whom she said she had complete confidence.2 sources2 sources