Francisco Gattorno’s betrayal put Cynthia Klitbo in Florence with a razor

A camera hidden behind an arch on the Arno. A razor moving across Cynthia Klitbo’s scalp without a mirror. Local tourists gathering on Ponte Vecchio, uncertain whether what they were watching was real. It was both.

The scene Klitbo filmed in Florence for the 1998 telenovela El Privilegio de Amar — in which her villainous character Tamara de la Colina shaves her head while in Europe — is routinely cited as one of the most striking moments in Mexican television history. Its boldness looked like a character decision. It was, in fact, something more personal and harder to name.

In late July 2026, on La Casa de los Famosos México, Klitbo was asked directly why she had divorced Cuban actor Francisco Gattorno. Her answer was four words. “Porque embarazó a su amante.” Because he got his lover pregnant.

The revelation has circulated widely — reported by Univision, TV Notas, El Universal, Infobae, and Milenio, among others — but what it quietly changes is the provenance of that Florence scene. Klitbo did not describe the head-shaving as a performance choice. She described it as a ritual she had been preparing to perform in her own life, borrowed for her character because the pain was already there.

The marriage that lasted three months

The relationship between Klitbo and Gattorno was one of those romances that seemed designed to play out on screen before it was lived off it. They met in 1995 on the set of La Dueña, the telenovela in which Gattorno played the male lead — his first major Mexican role, two years after arriving from Cuba. They married civilly in Mexico City in 1997. The marriage lasted approximately three months.

What ended it was not, strictly speaking, the infidelity. What ended it was the evidence. In 1997, a car accident in Quintana Roo — with Gattorno behind the wheel and Cuban dancer Marilyn de la Caridad Rosado as his passenger — killed Rosado and made the parallel relationship impossible to conceal. The accident became public. SDP Noticias reported that Gattorno was charged with imprudential homicide, a charge dismissed after four years of investigation. Klitbo was in New York. Someone told her she needed to know.

She has described his pattern in precise terms. “Me pintó el cuerno, pero muchas veces,” she told the housemates on the show. He cheated on me, but many times. The plural mattered to her. The pregnancy made it final. “Me dejaron de amar,” she said in a separate account to TV y Novelas — they stopped loving me — as if the infidelity was less the wound than the diagnosis.

A ritual borrowed for a villain

By the time El Privilegio de Amar began production in 1998, Klitbo was playing a character defined by extremity. Tamara de la Colina was the telenovela’s principal antagonist — a woman the audience learned to watch suffer and retaliate. Her character had already been burned and hanged. But the head-shaving was Klitbo’s own idea, not a writer’s.

She has described the origin as something she learned from her ex-sister-in-law, who had shaved her own head after a breakup, drawing on what Klitbo told Milenio was a traditional practice — cutting the hair and burying it under the moon to change one’s energy. “Había tronado con Gattorno y estaba destruida,” she said. I had broken up with Gattorno and I was destroyed. She proposed the scene to producer Carla Estrada. Estrada accepted.

The filming at Ponte Vecchio was unauthorized. Estrada later confirmed that the location — a heavily trafficked medieval bridge lined with jewelry shops, with frequent police patrols — required permits the production did not have. The crew hid the camera behind a stone arch. When Klitbo began cutting her hair, passersby gathered. As reported, the tourists did not know they were watching a television shoot; some apparently tried to console her. The police patrol passed without noticing. The entire crew risked arrest.

Klitbo shaved without a mirror. She finished the transformation at her hotel and returned to Mexico to continue playing her villain while the rest of her life stayed private. She joked later that the result made her look like Tweety Bird. That remark contains, if you choose to hear it, everything.

What the audience saw and what they were watching

The strongest argument against reading the scene as autobiography is also the most straightforward one. Actors draw on personal experience constantly. Klitbo was a skilled professional who made a deliberate choice — a choice shaped by grief, yes, but also by a performer’s instinct for what would land on screen. Reducing the moment to its emotional origin risks stripping out the craft that made it work. And Gattorno — who has not, as far as the public record shows, responded to Klitbo’s 2026 statements — is being discussed for events from almost thirty years ago. We are hearing one side of a marriage that ended before many of El Privilegio de Amar‘s current audience was born.

Both considerations are honest. What they do not quite address is the specific nature of what Klitbo did in Florence. There is a difference between drawing on an emotional state to inform an existing scene and proposing a scene because you were already planning to perform the same act in your actual life. Klitbo did not channel her grief into a preexisting story beat. She brought the scene into existence. The character became the cover story for something she needed to do herself.

That is what makes the Ponte Vecchio footage, watched now, feel different from other charged performances. Most of the time when actors speak about emotional truth, they mean something psychological. Klitbo is describing something physical and ritual: a woman on a bridge, without a mirror, removing the material fact of a year that had dismantled her.

Twelve years of silence and what came after

The estrangement lasted twelve years. Klitbo and Gattorno did not speak from 1997 until around 2009, when they crossed paths again during the filming of Atrévete a Soñar. She has said they are now friends. She has also said, in the same breath in which she described her devastation, that there is no animosity.

Gattorno has been married to Adamaris Espinosa since 2019. He has largely stepped back from the telenovela world. The distance between the man who drove that car in Quintana Roo in 1997 and the person he describes himself as now is the kind of distance only time produces.

What is clear is that Klitbo’s public account — offered not in a controlled press interview but in the compressed, sleepless intimacy of a reality TV house — carries the quality of something she had carried a long time. She said it quickly. She did not perform it.

What is documented — and what is still only hers to tell

What the public record confirms: the marriage in 1997, the accident in Quintana Roo that same year, the twelve-year estrangement, the filming at Ponte Vecchio without permits, and Klitbo’s July 2026 disclosure on La Casa de los Famosos México, reported independently by Univision, El Universal, TV Notas, Infobae, and Milenio.

What belongs to interpretation: how deliberate the conflation of personal ritual and character arc was at the time of filming; whether the account Klitbo has offered in 2026 represents the full texture of a marriage that only she and Gattorno inhabited; and what Gattorno, who has not spoken publicly about these events, might add to a story that is, as yet, entirely in her telling.

She still looked like Tweety Bird. She still doesn’t care.

Tags: celebrity divorces, Cynthia Klitbo, El Privilegio de Amar, Francisco Gattorno, La Casa de los Famosos, telenovelas