Lupe Ontiveros

Lupe Ontiveros, born Guadalupe Moreno on September 17, 1942, in El Paso, Texas, was an American actress whose stage and screen career spanned decades and encompassed film, television, and Broadway. She was the daughter of Luz "Lucita" Castañón and Juan Moreno, middle-class Mexican immigrants who owned a tortilla factory and two restaurants in El Paso. Ontiveros was raised Roman Catholic, graduated from El Paso High School, and earned a bachelor's degree in social work from Texas Woman's University in Denton, Texas, in 1964. She married Elías Ontiveros in 1966, and the couple relocated to California. For eighteen years she worked as a social worker before an article about the need for local film extras prompted her, with her husband's encouragement, to pursue acting. That decision launched a career that would make her one of the most recognized Latina performers in American entertainment.

Ontiveros made her Broadway appearance in 1979 in Zoot Suit, the Luis Valdez play in which she originated the role of Dolores at the community level before bringing it to the New York stage. The production was the first Mexican American theatrical work ever to play on Broadway. She had first been cast in the role in 1978 at Nosotros, a community theater in Los Angeles, where she had begun her acting training while still working full days in her social work career. She later reprised the role of Dolores in the 1982 film adaptation of Zoot Suit. Ontiveros was also a founding member of the Latino Theater Company.

Her film career included a wide range of roles across several decades. One of her earliest prominent parts was in Gregory Nava's 1983 film El Norte, in which she played a seamstress and maid who serves as a mentor to a newly arrived immigrant girl from Guatemala. In a 2004 interview, Ontiveros named El Norte the film that would always remain with her, describing it as one that tells the immigrants' story. She played the Spanish-speaking housekeeper Rosalita in the 1985 adventure film The Goonies and appeared as a housekeeper in Dolly Dearest in 1992. She had a cameo in Blood In Blood Out in 1993 as Carmen, a drug dealer whose arrest is carried out by a character played by Benjamin Bratt. Ontiveros continued her collaboration with Nava in My Family/Mi Familia in 1995 and Selena in 1997, the latter film casting her as Yolanda Saldívar, the woman who murdered Tejano singer Selena. She also appeared in the Academy Award-winning film As Good as It Gets.

In 2000, Ontiveros starred in the independent film Chuck & Buck, playing Beverly, a theater director who stages a play written by one of the film's central characters. She stated in multiple interviews that she accepted the role before reading the script, motivated entirely by the fact that the character was not defined by Hispanic ethnicity. The performance earned her a nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture at the 2000 Independent Spirit Awards and the National Board of Review award for Best Supporting Actress. Two years later, she co-starred with America Ferrera in Real Women Have Curves, playing the overbearing mother of Ferrera's character. That performance brought Ontiveros and Ferrera a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The two actresses later appeared together again in the family comedy Our Family Wedding. Ontiveros continued working in both studio and independent productions, including This Christmas in 2007 and My Uncle Rafael in 2012. She also participated in the 2011 web series Los Americans, alongside Esai Morales, Tony Plana, Yvonne DeLaRosa, JC Gonzalez, Raymond Cruz, and Ana Villafañe.

Throughout her career, Ontiveros estimated that she had played a maid at least 150 times on stage and screen. She was selected as the narrator for the documentary Maid in America in part because of that history. Her television work included a recurring role in the 2004–05 season of Desperate Housewives as Juanita Solis, Gabrielle's mother-in-law, for which she received an Emmy nomination for Best Guest Actress in a Comedy Series. Beginning in 2004, she voiced Abuela Elena in the animated PBS children's series Maya & Miguel, a bilingual and multicultural production for which she suggested a sign language-themed episode, leading to the introduction of a deaf character named Marco; Ontiveros herself had two deaf adult sons. She starred in the WB series Greetings from Tucson as the grandmother of a family of mixed Irish and Mexican heritage and held recurring roles in Veronica's Closet, for which she won an ALMA Award in 1998, and in the soap opera Pasadena. Her guest appearances included Hill Street Blues, Red Shoe Diaries, Resurrection Blvd., Cory in the House, and King of the Hill, among others.

Outside of acting, Ontiveros remained active in causes she had championed during her years as a social worker, including domestic violence prevention and AIDS awareness and prevention. She and her husband Elías had three sons, Alejandro, Elias, and Nicholas, and the family lived in Pico Rivera, California. Ontiveros died on July 26, 2012, at Presbyterian Hospital in Whittier, California, at the age of 69, following a battle with liver cancer. After a funeral at St. Hilary Church of Perpetual Adoration in Pico Rivera, she was buried at Rose Hills Memorial Park.