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Benicio Del Toro
| Biography |
New stars come and go, but seldom do truly great screen actors appear, performers of such intensity and focus they are near-guaranteed a long, illustrious and award-strewn career. Such an actor is Benicio Del Toro. Like many Latino talents before him, he faced being typecast as a sleazy Mex villain but, through a combination of hard study and risky experiment, he rose above that demeaning destiny to become only the third Puerto Rican Oscar winner. For the most part steering clear of big budget mainstream Hollywood projects, he has cemented his reputation as both an artist and character actor - just like his past co-stars Robert De Niro, Sean Penn and, especially, Marlon Brando.
He was born in the Santurce section of San Juan, Puerto Rico on the 19th of February, 1967. As far as his future career would be concerned, this was a fortuitous birth-place. Though it's far closer to Venezuela than Florida, Puerto Rico is an American territory, and its population needs no visa to move to the States and no green card to work there. This would serve young Benicio well, both in his education and his work.
His father, Gustavo Adolfo Del Toro Bermudez, was a lawyer, popularly known as Don Gustavo, Lawyer of the Poor. So was his mother, Fausta Sanchez Rivera, known to her family as Piqui. Indeed many of his relatives were involved in the island's legal system. There was one brother, Gustavo, two years older than Benicio, who'd later become a paediatric oncologist, working his cancer-stricken children in Manhattan |
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