Silvia Pinal, Golden Age Star of Mexican Cinema, Is Dead

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. Ms. Pinal was believed to be 93, though 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 Moreno, 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 up 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.

More awards soon followed. She took home the Ariel as best actress in 1956 for “Locura Pasional” (“Passionate Madness”), in which she played a theater star who lands in the cross hairs of her jealous and murderous husband, and a year later for “La Dulce Enemiga” (“The Sweet Enemy”), in which she played a femme fatale whose story is told in flashbacks by the ghosts of erstwhile lovers.

For all her outsize success in her native land, it was her work with Mr. Buñuel that made her a familiar name to cineastes around the world.

Their partnership started with pluck. Ms. Pinal earned her role in the twisted period drama “Viridiana” (1961) only after her second of four husbands, the director and producer Gustavo Alatriste, who produced the film, journeyed to Mr. Buñuel’s home to lobby for her to get the part.

“I chose Buñuel, not he me,” Ms. Pinal later said.

In a 1996 interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, she recalled that “the environment that surrounded him was very intellectual.” It was, she added, “a very closed world, where he was the king and was respected as such.”

The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, who described “Viridiana” as a “grim and tumorous tale of a beautiful young religious novice who gets into an unholy mess when she gives up her holy calling to try to atone for a wrong she has done,” praised Ms. Pinal’s work. He wrote that she was “lovely and precisely as stiff and forbidding as she should be as the misguided novice.”

Even though the movie was banned in Spain under the military dictatorship of Francisco Franco and denounced by the official Vatican newspaper, “Viridiana” shared the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Ms. Pinal furthered her career with Mr. Buñuel in the 1962 film “The Exterminating Angel,” a sinister black comedy about a group of wealthy guests who begin to unravel when they find themselves mysteriously trapped at a dinner party in a Mexico City townhouse. Ms. Pinal played Leticia, known as the Valkyrie, who eventually helps the surviving guests escape.

While “The Exterminating Angel” was eventually anointed a classic — it tied for 52nd in the 2022 Sight and Sound directors’ poll of the greatest films of all time — it baffled many viewers. It also baffled Ms. Pinal. “To this day,” she said in a 2006 interview when the Criterion Collection released it on DVD, “I don’t know what that film is about.”

According to many reports, Ms. Pinal was born on Sept. 12, 1931, in Guaymas, a port city in the state of Sonora. She was the product of a romance between her 15-year-old mother, María Luisa Hidalgo Aguilar, who worked in a restaurant, and the orchestra director Moisés Pasquel, who was already married at the time. She later adopted the surname of her stepfather, Luis G. Pinal, a journalist and politician.

By her early teens she was studying acting, with her sights set on becoming a movie star, despite Mr. Pinal’s protestations that she pursue a more stable career. Her dreams began to take shape after she married the Cuban-born actor and director Rafael Banquells and honed her skills in theater. She made her move to the big screen in a series of films in 1949, including “La Mujer Que Yo Perdí” (“The Woman I Lost”), which starred Mr. Infante.

Ms. Pinal also made films in Europe, including the 1959 Italian comedy “Uomini e Nobiluomini” (“Men and Noblemen”), starring the celebrated actor and director Vittorio De Sica and Elke Sommer. She made a foray of sorts into Hollywood with the 1969 English-language action movie “Shark,” a joint Mexican-American production starring Burt Reynolds and directed by Samuel Fuller.

She also worked extensively in Mexican television, and in 1985 she began producing and hosting “Mujer, Casos de la Vida Real” (“Woman, Real Life Cases”), an anthology series presenting dramas based on true stories about women facing domestic abuse and other crises. It ran until 2007.

Ms. Pinal’s survivors include her daughters, Sylvia Pasquel, an actress, and Alejandra Guzmán, a Mexican singing star and entrepreneur; her son, Luis Enrique Guzmán; four granddaughters; and two great-granddaughters. Another daughter, Viridiana, also an actress, died at 19 in a car accident. All four of her marriages, including to the rock singer Enrique Guzmán and the politician Tulio Hernández Gómez, ended in divorce.

In a Criterion Collection interview for “Simon of the Desert” (1965), another film she made with Mr. Buñuel, Ms. Pinal expressed gratitude for having the opportunity to work with a master of the absurd. “Working with Buñuel,” she said, “was the most important part of my career. It accorded me a place in film archives around the world, and in the history of world cinema.”