Gilberto Forero

Death: March 24, 1997

Chilean actor and stagehand based in Cali. He started in the world of theater as a vagabond and spontaneous that got into everywhere. He did not tread the boards as an actor, but he did help to place them, as he worked as a painter during the construction of the Municipal Theater of Cali. A theater company that visited the city, in which he worked, served to initiate him as a stagehand and over the years he was the best in the trade. Thus he became an expert at lowering and raising the curtain. In 1921 he participated as a stagehand during the filming of María, the first feature film made in Colombia directed by Máximo Calvo and Alfredo del Diestro, a film based on the novel of the same name by Jorge Isaacs. In 1941 he participated in the film Flores del Valle, by Spanish filmmaker Máximo Calvo. The film was the first feature film with sound produced in Colombia. More than 40 years would pass and it would be during the 80's that Mr. Fly would have his golden age, venturing again into cinema when he was rediscovered by directors Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo. In this way he filmed three more movies, Pura sangre, by Ospina, in 1982; Carne de tu carne, by Mayolo, in 1983; and El secuestro de Lupe. Of all of them, his most outstanding work was in Pura sangre, which was Luis Ospina's first feature film and perhaps the director's most important work, where Mr. Fly played the leading role representing 'Roberto Hurtado', a millionaire landowner from Valle del Cauca who had to receive blood transfusions from victims trapped by his son and who generated the urban myth of the 'Monster of the mangons'. The character was based on a popular businessman from Cali at the time, Don Adolfo Aristizábal, a role that so marked Mr. Fly that much later the stagehand kept one of his characteristic features of the character, the five-centimeter long fingernail on the thumb of the right hand, just as the old sick man exhibited it in the film. In 1985 Forero participated along with the pioneer actresses of Colombian cinema Stella López Pomareda and Esperanza Calvo Cadavid, in the documentary short film En busca de María, by Luis Ospina and Jorge Nieto. This new appearance of Mr. Fly on the scene came 64 years after he had worked as a stagehand and López Pomareda as the protagonist in the shooting of María, the first feature film made in Colombia in 1921, directed by Máximo Calvo, Esperanza Calvo's father. Ospina and Nieto's documentary brought together historical research techniques, interviews and scenic reconstruction to rescue the memory of María, the first Colombian feature film. Gilberto 'Fly' Forero died in Cali after a long period of illness at the Hospital Universitario del Valle, on March 24, 1997.