He is a member of The Associated Press’ race and ethnicity team. Russell Contreras reported from Albuquerque, New Mexico. The film, a co-presentation of American Masters and VOCES, is slated to premiere Friday on most PBS stations. His surviving sons and widow, Merel Poloway, remember Juliá as a devoted father.ĭel Toro would say he kept trying to achieve his dream to become an actor because of Juliá and all the rejections he endured decades before. Period,” Juliá said in one interview.ĭuring his time on Broadway and in film, Juliá stood in contrast to the darker artistic world of Nuyorican performers like Miguel Piñero who crafted images of sexual violence, drug addiction and poverty. “There is a great ignorance in this country about what a Hispanic person is. In other words, DeJesus said Juliá was “woke” before woke was a word and an easy concept to push via hashtags on social media. Merel Poloway (born 1946), American actress, wife of Raúl Juliá Merel S. Juliá, it would turn out, used his trailblazing status to help other young actors of colour and bring attention to social issues like world hunger and Puerto Rican independence. “In many ways, he was way before his time.” “He meant so much to so many people,” DeJesus said. In each of his roles, Juliá was attempting to redefine what it meant to be Hispanic in the United States, a nation that has long ignored Latinos or regulated them to subservient roles in movies and in life, said Ben DeJesus, the documentary’s director. Born Ra ú l Rafael Carlos Juli á y Arcelay on March 9, 1940, in San Juan, Puerto Rico died on October 24, 1994, in Manhasset, NY son of Ra ú l Juli á (an engineer and entrepreneur) and Olga Arcelay (an amateur singer) married Magda Vasallo (divorced, 1969) married Merel Poloway (a dancer-actress), 1976 children: two sons. Juliá died in 1994 at the age of 54 due to complications from a stroke. Using rare footage of Juliá and interviews of Latino actors who credit him for opening doors, the film explores his fight to battle stereotypes and garner respect as a performer. “Raúl Juliá: The World’s a Stage” looks into the actor’s life from his middle-class upbringing in Puerto Rico to the streets of New York as he attempted to break into theatre. The influential Puerto Rican actor, who opened doors for a generation of Latino artists in film and television from the 1970s through the 1990s, is the subject of a new PBS documentary. Members of Generation X may know Raúl Juliá for his energetic and playful role as Gomez Addams in the 1991 movie adaptation of “The Addams Family.” Others may think of Juliá in his critically acclaimed role in the 1985 “Kiss of the Spider Woman” as revolutionary Valentin Arregui.īut to actors like Edward James Olmos, Rita Moreno, Andy Garcia, John Leguizamo, and Benicio del Toro, the man many of them knew as Raulito served as a mentor, an advocate and a groundbreaker who paved the way to success for a generation of Latino performers. Merel Poloway is an actress and the widow of actor Raúl Juliá.
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