Gloria Menezes: A life dedicated to stage, television and cinema

A brazilian actress Gloria Menezes, who died today at the age of 91, celebrated in Portugal for the performance in soap operas as “War of Sex”, having extended to Lisbon the celebration of 40 years career, with the play “Jornada de Um Poema”.

Glória Menezes, artistic name of Nilcedes Soares Magalhães, was born on October 19, 1934, in the city of Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul and lived in São Paulo, where he graduated from the Escola Superior de Arte Dramatica and founded the Young Independents theater company.

It premiered on TV Tupi de São Paulo, in the play “A Place to the Sun”, which happened “A estranha Clementine”, but its revelation took place in the cinema, as co-protagonist of “O Págador de Promessas”, by Anselmo Duarte, one of the founding films of the New Brazilian Cinema, Palma de Ouro do Festival de Cannes, in 1962.

Success has opened the doors of prime time in television stations.

On TV Excelsior, he starred in the first Brazilian daily soap opera, “2-5499 Occupied” (1963), succeeding productions such as “Almas de Pedra” (1966) and “O Grande Secret” (1966), until joining Rede Globo in 1968, as part of the cast of the soap opera “Blood and Sand”.

The popularity of Glória Menezes in Portugal originated in the soap operas “Pai Hero” (1979) and “War of Sex” (1983), followed by “Brega e Chique” (1987), “The Queen of Scrap” (1990) and “The Next Victim” (1995), among other productions transmitted by RTP and SIC, over more than two decades, in which he contrasted with his husband, actor Tarcísio Meira (1935-2021), and his son Tarcísio Filho.

In 1996, he stood out in Brazil for refusing to continue filming “Vira-Lata”, in protest for the lack of quality of production.

Only two years later would I return to television, to play “Torre de Babel” (1998), remaining on the “small screen” in the following years in productions such as “Porto dos Milagres” (2001), “O Olho do Vampire” (2002), “Miss of Destiny” (2005), “Páginas da Vida” (2007), “A Favorita” (2009), “Crazy for They” (2013) and “Totally Too Much” (2016), the last soap opera in which she participated.

In the cinema, Glória Menezes went into films such as “Independence or Death” (1972), by Carlos Coimbra, “The Esmeraldas Hunter (1979), by Oswaldo Oliveira, and “To Live a Great Love” (1984), by Miguel Faria Jr., about Chico Buarque’s story.

In the theater, he played texts by William Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Ettore Scola, Collin Higgins, Bernard Slade and Henry Gheon, who marked his stage debut in 1957 with the play “Devotion to the Cross”.

Since 2007, Gloria Menezes has repeatedly taken over, on stage, the play “Teach Me to Live” (“Harold and Maude”) by Colling Higgins, on the basis of Hal Ashby’s homonymous film.

In 2001, at the Tivoli Theatre in Lisbon, the actress made the Portuguese debut of “Jornada de Um Poema” by the American Margarete Edson, Pulitzer Prize the previous year.

Gloria Menezes assumed the role of Vivian Bearing, a literature teacher in the last days of her life, who challenged death with a sense of humor and irony, on a journey dominated by the poem “Death Be Not Proud” (“Death, do not be proud”) by John Donne, a 17th-century British author.

In 2025, the Brazilian network Globo dedicated a tribute to the actress.