Mirtha Legrand

Rosa María Juana Martínez Suárez was fourteen years old when director Francisco Mugica asked her to walk down a staircase in a white dress. It happened during the filming of Los martes, orquídeas (1941), a light comedy from Lumiton Studios that changed her career. That job not only took her out of extra roles alongside her twin sister Silvia, but also earned her a five-year exclusive contract and a permanent stage name: Mirtha Legrand.

Villa Cañás already seemed very far away.

During the 1940s and 1950s, the Argentine film industry produced at a feverish pace, and Mirtha made more than thirty feature films with almost no rest. Titles such as Safo, historia de una pasión (1943), directed by Carlos Hugo Christensen, tested the censors by receiving the first Not for Minors rating in the country's cinema. Her marriage in 1946 to French-born director Daniel Tinayre shaped the rest of her filmography.

Tinayre directed her in projects such as La vendedora de fantasías (1950) and En la ardiente oscuridad (1959), which adapted the stage play by Antonio Buero Vallejo. The actress alternated bourgeois comedy with chamber drama while Río de la Plata audiences filled theaters. By the age of thirty-five, she had appeared in nearly everything the commercial circuit had to offer. But the traditional model of the big studios eventually gave way to the massive arrival of television in homes.

The Tablecloth That Replaced the Celluloid

On June 3, 1968, businessman Alejandro Romay proposed an idea that seemed absurd for an actress of her stature: having lunch live in front of the cameras. The format launched under the title Almorzando con las estrellas on Canal 9, although the production soon changed the title card to Almorzando con Mirtha Legrand.

And the formula devoured the rest of the lineup.

She seated ministers, revue theater actresses, union leaders and international singers at her table. That after-lunch gathering soon turned into a political interrogation, where the hostess fired uncomfortable questions with a polite smile and fork in hand. The years of military dictatorship, the return of democracy in 1983 and Argentina's successive economic collapses all passed through that dining room.

Because the screen worked as a social thermometer for the country, presidential candidates competed to get a seat on her show before going to the polls. Her brother, director José Martínez Suárez, preferred the rigor of independent cinema and cultural management at the Mar del Plata Film Festival, but she bet on the tyranny of weekly live television.

A Set Locked Down by Contract

The passing decades did not lower her standards for her technical environment. When Telefe produced the unitary drama La dueña in 2012, Mirtha agreed to return to dramatic fiction after forty years away from film sets. The premiere drew a sustained average of nearly thirty points of audience share, confirming that her presence went beyond the dynamics of the midday talk show.

She quickly returned to her routine of debate tables, split on weekends between La noche de Mirtha on Saturdays and Sunday lunches on El Trece. As the 2020s arrived, her grandson Nacho Viale took the reins of the production company StoryLab to handle the annual broadcast contracts with the network's management.

During the 2020 lockdown, she temporarily handed hosting duties to her granddaughter Juana Viale as a medical precaution. But at the end of 2021, she returned to the head of the table at ninety-four years old, having recovered from heart surgery to fit a pacemaker. So the production reorganized its camera shots to favor her direct interventions in medium shots.

Nobody questions her framing.

In 2024, the production company secured broadcast deals to extend her show through late December at the Martínez studios, with a technical crew of sixty permanent staff. The broadcast on December 6, 2025 on El Trece required two and a half hours of nonstop live airtime, with the host taking no break to eat and only sipping small cups of tea during commercial breaks.