LOS ANGELES -- Veteran actress Lupe Ontiveros, the El Paso, Texas-born daughter of Mexican immigrants, once estimated that she had played the role of a maid more than 150 times during her career.
That's why the 4-foot-11 actress was so overjoyed more than a decade ago when director Miguel Arteta approached her backstage after a theatrical showcase and said he had a screenplay for her to consider.
"He said, 'Look at the part of Beverly,' " Ontiveros recalled in a 2009 National Public Radio interview. "I said, 'Beverly? You said Beverly? Her name is Beverly?' And I said, 'I'll do it. I don't care what the script is about, because her name is Beverly.' It wasn't Maria Guadalupe Conchita Esperanza, this Latino stereotype."
Ontiveros' role as the straight-talking theater house manager in the 2000 movie "Chuck & Buck," a part she said was written for a white actress, was a breakthrough moment.
Her best-known roles include the former fan club president who kills pop star Selena and the tradition-bound mother in the 2002 film "Real Women Have Curves."
Ontiveros, a longtime resident of Pico Rivera, Calif., died Thursday of liver cancer in a Whittier, Calif., hospital, said her agent, Michael Greenwald. She was 69.
"Lupe Ontiveros was a gift," actor Edward James Olmos told The Los Angeles Times on Friday. "She was part of the evolutionary process of the art form of Latino storytelling in the last 30-plus years. She was one of the true pioneers of the Latin artistic movement in theater, film and television."
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/07/27/3727864/lupe-ontiveros-desperate-housewives.html#storylink=cpy
Broadcasting to the Latino Community in Kansas City and Worldwide
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