EDUARDO YÁÑEZ •Age: 55 years old. •Nationality: Mexico •Lives: In Los Angeles. •Civil status: He is currently single. He has been married twice. •Who makes him happy: His son, Eduardo Yáñez Jr. •Biggest telenoveas he has starred in: Destilando Amor, Senda de Gloria, Fuego en la sangre, Amores con trampa. •Biggest movies in Mexico: La muerte cruzó el Río Bravo, Contrato con la muerte, Yako, Cazador de Malditos, Narcoterror. •Biggest movies in Hollywood: The Punisher, Striptease, Held-up. •What makes him a leader, his philosophy: Never, ever give up. He gets beaten down, but he always gets up. A real warrior.
“He has that rugged figure few actors have,” said Herrera. “He is the virile type, but handsome.”
The day Mexican cinema died
Some speculate that Yáñez, if he would have continued to star in movies, would have taken Rivero’s place (the icon was a genuine sex symbol who starred in box office smashes in Mexico, Latin America and the places in the U.S. where they showed Mexican movies targeting immigrants, which were many). But one thing stood in his way: the demise of commercial Mexican cinema. Most movie history books about the Mexican film industry are full of Mexico’s golden age of movies. Tin Tan, Cantinflas, Pedro Infante, Pedro Armendariz, Maria Felix and Dolores del Rio are well documented. But in a sort of historical amnesia – whether by deliberate or not – cinematic historians omit almost every reference to the movies of Mexico produced from the late 1970s and 1980s, when Yáñez busted onto the scene. Genre movies, though not as creative as previous generations, still attracted audiences. For example, Hugo Stiglitz, the Mexican actor known mostly for genre movies of that era, is a Quentin Tarantino
favorite, and other films from that era directly influenced filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, who even made his own “frontera” movie in El Mariachi. Notwithstanding, dark clouds had been hovering above the Mexican movie industry since the 1970s. Left-leaning president Luis Echeverria had budgeted in 1970 one billion pesos — then an enormous sum — to fund a rash of new filmmakers who brought a bold but not so commercial aspect to the box office. But the new state-funded cinema (the spiritual father of today’s “New Mexican Cinema”) clashed with studio-driven cinema (of which Yáñez was part of). The left-leaning state movies claimed that commercial movies were trash, while the studios believed that the money poured into the new films was being wasted on directors full of themselves whose work always crashed at the box office. By 1988, Yáñez was already an established name in Mexico, able to command projects, star in telenovelas and lead movies that made money and even go on tour to promote movies in Los Angeles for the considerable Spanish-speaking media. In 1989, the year that Jorge Fons’ Rojo Amanecer about the Massacre at Tlatelolco came out—a critical and commercial success—was the year everything went to hell in the Mexican movie industry. Historians concur that a perfect storm made up of a cinema that forgot about how to make movies for the large, traditional Mexican family (horrible, sex comedies for male loners), a series of savage economic depressions, the advent of a video market and an ever-present corruption killed commercial Mexican cinema. EDUARDO YÁÑEZ, AT THE FRONT LOBBY OF HIS APARTMENT COMPLEX, DURING A SEPTEMBER PHOTO SESSION.
Tough times
On both the big screen and the small one, Yáñez kept busting out hit after hit, albeit with a few flops. Senda de Gloria (Path of Glory), one of the many and best of Alonso’s “historical telenovelas” about the end of the Mexican revolution and the years that followed, won critical acclaim by respected historians and won the TV Novelas award for best soap opera of 1987. Yáñez, who nabbed best actor trophy, played Manuel Fortuna, a journalist who chronicles that era. A year later, Yáñez starred in the hit teen soap, Dulce Desafio, telenovela—the first of many times he was paired with Adelan Noriega—that also earned him a TV Novelas best actor title. He was on a role. By 1990 the movie business in Mexico had imploded, but Televisa was as busy as ever, producing soap operas that it exported —and still does to this day— all over the world. Yáñez was its main leading man, starring in hits like Yo compro esa mujer, directed by the critically acclaimed Fons and En carne propia, where he plays a private eye, were big ratings hits. His personal life was another matter, though. For years, he acknowledged he had become a drinker. “Starting latinoleaders.com