Luis Aguilar

Admired equally for his vocal prowess and his screen presence, Luis Aguilar—known to audiences as el Gallo Giro—earned lasting renown as one of the defining figures of Mexico’s Golden Age of Cinema. Although his admirers often wished he had issued more studio recordings, Aguilar chose to concentrate his performances in films and nightclubs rather than on disc; even so, his deep, resonant baritone conveyed unmistakable warmth and intensity whenever he interpreted mariachi or ranchera material. Most biographical accounts place his birth in 1917 in Hermosillo, Sonora, though a minority of sources list 1918 instead. At twenty-one he relocated to Mazatlán on the Pacific coast, where proximity to the sea tempted him toward a life as a pescador until artistic opportunities intervened. While visiting Mexico City he attracted the attention of producer Raúl de Anda, who auditioned him on the spot and promptly offered him a contract. Aguilar made his screen debut in the 1943 feature Sota, Caballo y Rey and ultimately appeared in more than two hundred Mexican productions. His portrayal in the 1948 picture El Gallo Giro supplied the nickname that stayed with him thereafter. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s he became synonymous with the ranchera tradition, both as a musical style and as a cinematic genre; those two strands converged when he sang ranchera songs within ranchera films. Westerns likewise became closely associated with his image, yet he also took roles in comedies and crime dramas. Following Las Tres Compadres in 1974 he stepped away from the screen, only to resume acting in the mid-1980s. By then the classic ranchera and western formats had largely vanished, so Aguilar adapted by working primarily as a character actor who alternated between telenovelas and motion pictures. His most prominent television part came in the novela Muchachita, and his performance in the 1991 film Los Años de Greta earned him an Ariel Award. He married first Ana María Almada and later, in the 1950s, actress Rosario Gálvez; three children resulted from those unions. Aguilar was residing with Gálvez in Mexico City when he succumbed to heart failure during sleep on October 24, 1997, at roughly seventy-nine or eighty years of age. His widow later recalled, “Luis had always said to me jokingly that he was going to die while he was asleep, without pain, and his wish came true, since death surprised him while he was sleeping.”