Leonardo Favio, a film director, actor, and singer who was one of Argentina's most enduring cultural figures, died Monday in Buenos Aires after a series of illnesses, the Associated Press reported.
Mr. Favio began acting in movies in the 1950s under the direction of the noted Argentine filmmaker Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, and he soon became a star. After he appeared in Nilsson's 1958 release The Kidnapper, he became popularly known as "the Argentine James Dean."
Over the next decade, Mr. Favio continued to appear on screen and also began directing films of his own. In 1965, he directed his first feature-length movie, the semiautobiographical, black-and-white Chronicle of a Lonely Child.
Mr. Favio did not have consistent commercial success until the mid-1970s. The Nazarene Cross and the Wolf, his take on the werewolf myth, was released in 1975 and became one of the top-grossing films in Argentina's history.
In the late 1990s, he made Peron, a Symphony of Feeling, a nearly six-hour documentary about the former populist leader. - N.Y. Times News Service