Paulina García, the actress Gloria made famous at 52, now wants the camera

Paulina García

Photo: Secretaría de Cultura Ciudad de México (Milton Martínez fotógrafo) / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 27, 1960 Santiago, Chile
Occupation	Actress and theatre director
Known for	The 33, Gloria, Little Men
Awards	Silver Bear · Platino · Premio Pedro Sienna · Premio Caleuche · Biarritz Amérique Latine Best Performance, with Jenny Navarrete (shared)

There is a moment near the end of Gloria when a woman at a wedding turns down an invitation to dance, hears the DJ put on Umberto Tozzi’s song with her name in it and walks onto the floor alone. Her movements start small and grow until her arms are in the air, and the camera simply waits for her. Paulina García built an international career on that wait. The film turned a Chilean stage actress, barely known outside Santiago, into the face of a story cinema rarely tells: a divorced woman nearing sixty who wants pleasure and company and does not apologise for wanting them. The roles that followed abroad often asked her to stand a step behind the story, as somebody’s mother. The project García is pushing now, a film she is writing and will direct herself, is about a woman who walks out of exactly that position.

She came to the screen late and from the stage. A native of Santiago, García trained at the theatre school of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where she took a degree in acting and further diplomas in directing and playwriting. Her professional debut came in Luis Rivano’s ¿Dónde estará la Jeanette? at the university’s own theatre, and it brought her an award from APES, the association of Chile’s entertainment journalists.

From that 1983 debut onward, the theatre was her main address for three decades. She appeared in more than thirty productions, Raúl Osorio’s staging of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya among them, but the stage also made her a director. She began in 1996 with Marco Antonio de la Parra’s El continente negro, went on to John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Alejandro Sieveking’s La mantis religiosa, and wrote plays of her own, including Frágil. She helped found Chile’s Asociación de Directores de Teatro and taught acting for years in Santiago’s university drama schools.

Television knew her before cinema did. After a small part in the telenovela Los títeres, she became a familiar face to Chilean viewers as Raquel Reyna, known as La Raco, in Cárcel de mujeres, a role that won her an Altazor award in 2008, and as Mónica Spencer in Los archivos del cardenal, the series about the Catholic Church’s human rights office under the dictatorship. Her first feature, Joaquín Eyzaguirre’s Tres noches de un sábado, arrived in 2002, when the actress, born on 27 November 1960, was 41. Silvio Caiozzi cast her in Cachimba two years later.

Gloria changed the scale. As Gloria Cumplido, an office worker who spends her nights in the dance halls Santiago keeps for single adults, García is in almost every frame of Sebastián Lelio’s film, and much of what the character feels reaches the audience through her face rather than through dialogue. At the Berlinale in 2013 she won the Silver Bear for Best Actress; the Platino award for best actress followed a year later. The doors it opened were mostly English-speaking. Patricia Riggen cast her in The 33, about the miners trapped in the Atacama; Netflix made her Hermilda Gaviria, Pablo Escobar‘s mother, in the first two seasons of Narcos; and Ira Sachs gave her Leonor, a Chilean dressmaker in Brooklyn whose shop rent is about to be raised by her late landlord’s family, in Little Men, a performance that earned her an Independent Spirit Award nomination.

At home and across Latin America she became the kind of lead independent directors build a film around. Santiago Mitre placed her beside Ricardo Darín as the president’s closest aide in La cordillera. Cecilia Atán and Valeria Pivato made her Teresa, a domestic worker forced out of the house she served for decades, in La novia del desierto, a Cannes Un Certain Regard premiere that won her the Caleuche award for best leading actress. Claudia Huaiquimilla cast her as a teacher in a youth detention centre in Mis hermanos sueñan despiertos. In Ana Endara’s Querido trópico she plays Mercedes, a wealthy woman in Panama losing herself to Alzheimer’s, opposite Jenny Navarrete as the Colombian migrant who becomes her carer; the two shared the performance prize at the Biarritz Amérique Latine festival in 2024.

The neat version of her story, the actress discovered at 52, deserves some resistance. It was only a discovery from outside Chile. By the time Gloria reached Berlin, García had been a working stage actress for thirty years and a theatre director for nearly two decades. How the industry used that success is telling. When Lelio returned to the character, he remade the film in English as Gloria Bell with Julianne Moore, and the version that reached multiplexes in the English-speaking world carried Moore’s face on the poster. Reviewers who compared the two noted that García played Gloria largely through her face, where Moore’s version talks more. Since then her parts in English-language productions have been supporting ones, while the leads that let her carry a film have stayed in Spanish and on the festival circuit.

Streaming has given her the widest audience of her career this year. In April Netflix released Someone Has to Know, an eight-episode drama inspired by the disappearance of the student Jorge Matute Johns, in which she plays a mother who will not stop asking what happened to her missing son, opposite Alfredo Castro. In May the Mexican comedy-drama La vida es, directed by Lorena Villarreal, reached cinemas with García as Greta. On 16 September Prime Video premiered Cathedrals, a six-episode adaptation of Claudia Piñeiro‘s novel, where she and Castro play Dolores and Adolfo Sardá, a devout couple forced to face, thirty years on, the truth about the murder of their youngest daughter. Two days earlier Neto Villalobos’s Amor es el monstruo had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, with García as a woman of around seventy trying to stay close to her six-year-old granddaughter in a tropical dystopia that treats people her age as surplus.

García, who describes herself as a feminist, is the mother of three, among them the actress Sofía Zagal. This year she shared a panel on the gender gap in cinema with the producer Gabriela Sandoval at Brazil’s Bonito CineSur festival.

Sandoval’s company, Storyboard Media, is also producing her first feature as a director, La pasión según Carmen, co-written with Mariana Loyola and Josefina Fernández. Loyola plays Carmen, a married journalist with a grown daughter, still grieving the grandmother who was her closest friend, whose life breaks open after an accident on the way to a feminist march and an unexpected passion for a woman. “We want to tell the physical and emotional transformation that we women go through,” García said when the project was announced. Gloria ended with a woman choosing herself on a dance floor while somebody else decided where the camera stood. On her own film, that decision is finally García’s.