So there’s this lady known as Mirtha Legrand; no, that isn’t her real name, but rather her stage name.
She is quite the legend down there in Buenos Aires. She’s 98 now, and she hosted the same TV show for… 54 years. Not only that, her career in cinema had actually started in 1941, so literally before my dad was born in 1943.
Precisely, my father told me once this anecdote, relayed from my late maternal grandmother Janina: when Mrs. Legrand and her sister (also an actress who passed away in 2020) came to Buenos Aires, they were living in the same neighborhood as my Polish grandparents. My grandmother used to ride a particular tramway line to go to the hospital for the regular checks on my newborn uncle Jorge, and she’d meet the Legrand sisters on the tram and exchange a few words, around 1941, precisely.
Mirtha was married to a French movie director, Daniel Tinayre, from 1945 until his death in 1994.
One of her nieces was kidnapped by the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983, and the celebrity status of her aunt made all the difference; 48 hours after her disappearance, her niece was released alive. This niece later testified in the Trial of the Juntas.
(Speaking of which, have you seen “Argentina, 1985”? I recommend it.)
Mrs. Legrand hosted “Almorzando con Mirtha Legrand” (literally translated as “Having Lunch with Mirtha Legrand”), a show where she received celebrities of all horizons as lunch guests from 1968 to 2022. The program has changed channels, it was censored at least once, it went from black and white to color in 1980, and it has had an innumerable quantity of bloopers and epic moments, but the formula has stayed the same ever since.
To say that it’s a staple of Argentine television is not enough. The lady isn’t hosting the lunches anymore, but still has a nightly talk show, and was recently awarded a honorific “Martín Fierro Award”, the Emmy Award of Argentine television, for her trajectory.
PS: The name “Martín Fierro” comes from the book of the same name, considered the most famous literary work in Argentine literature of all time… a work of poetry that I cannot read without shedding a tear. But this is a story for another day.