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FILM; Eyes on Oscar: Brazil's 'National Treasure' . . .

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March 21, 1999, Section 2, Page 13Buy Reprints
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THE first time it occurred to Fernanda Montenegro that she could win an Academy Award for best actress was at the Berlin Film Festival early last year, before she and the film ''Central Station'' had won the festival's top prizes. At breakfast one morning, the movie's producer, Arthur Cohn, turned to her and said: ''You know, you're going to get an Oscar nomination out of this.''

Since Mr. Cohn has five Oscars of his own for foreign films and documentaries, his opinion is not to be dismissed lightly. At the time, though, his prediction seemed far-fetched, Ms. Montenegro recalled during an interview at her Ipanema apartment here a few days before heading to Hollywood and tonight's award ceremonies. ''I regarded it with disbelief, as simply a compliment, a warmer, nicer way of saying 'Have a pleasant day,' '' she said.

Even now, the odds would seem to be stacked against her. At age 69, Ms. Montenegro has acted in just nine movies, and until ''Central Station,'' in which she plays an embittered former schoolteacher who becomes a letter writer for illiterate people in order to eke out a living, only a couple had been released in the United States. There, she said, ''the only time they are likely turn up is when someone is organizing a Brazilian or Latin American film festival.''

Filmed in Portuguese with a limited budget and a semidocumentary style, even ''Central Station'' is a ''small'' movie by Hollywood standards. But Ms. Montenegro's performance as the cynical, exhausted Dora is so powerful and commanding, so intertwined with the movie's tale of redemption, that critics and audiences have responded to it with lavish praise and wonderment.

''From the very start, the role of Dora was written with her in mind,'' said Walter Salles, the 41-year-old Brazilian director of ''Central Station.'' ''I had seen a lot of her theater work and all of the films she had done, and what struck me is that she always brings an integrity to the characters she plays, an interpretation with so many layers it is impossible not to be fascinated.''

That was important, Mr. Salles said, because Dora was meant to strike the audience as unsympathetic at first but then to become more human as she rediscovers her capacity for love through a relationship with a boy whose mother has died. ''I knew Fernanda would feel a sense of solidarity with the character and not judge her,'' Mr. Salles said. ''That courage to dive into the abyss is what makes her one of the best actresses not just in Brazil but in the world.''

Long before ''Central Station,'' though, Brazilians considered Ms. Montenegro a national treasure. In a career that has spanned more than 50 years, she has performed not only in films but for the theater, radio and television. ''I've been from one end of this country to the other probably 30 times,'' she said, a practice that has made her almost as recognizable to her countrymen as the soccer star Pele or a pop star like Gilberto Gil.

Since 1959, Ms. Montenegro and her husband of 45 years, the director and actor Fernando Torres, have also managed their own theater company, going door to door trying to raise money from corporations and mounting productions of modern and classic plays, which they take on the road to large cities and small towns. ''Everything we have, the theater has given us,'' she said. ''We live in the world of the theater, doing plays our entire lives.''

Most recently the couple collaborated on Chekhov's ''Sea Gull,'' which traveled to eight Brazilian cities last year. But over the years, responding to what she describes as ''a fever, a flame, a need'' to explore the craft of acting, Ms. Montenegro has also performed in works by Edward Albee, Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neill, Harold Pinter, Moliere, Pirandello, Racine, Shaw and Brazil's greatest modern playwright, Nelson Rodrigues, with occasional forays into the terrain of Neil Simon and Noel Coward.

''Fernanda has an infinite capacity and disposition for work, and never considers any performance finished,'' said Jose Wilker, the Brazilian actor known to foreign audiences for his roles in ''Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands'' and ''Bye Bye Brazil.'' ''A play can have run for two years and it's always a work in progress to her, a chance to find a new way to read her character.

That is something rare and admirable,'' he continued. ''After all, many people have talent, but not all have the vocation, that inner call.''

ON the frothy television soap operas that are the backbone of Brazilian prime time entertainment, Ms. Montenegro is almost always cast as ''the rich woman, the elegant, well-dressed magnate's wife who lives in a big mansion,'' she said. While many American actors of comparable stature would shun such roles, she does not have that luxury. ''We live a different reality here,'' she said. ''Nobody can make a living just from acting for films.''

Besides, she added, ''if I accept a role, I always do it with maximum effort and position myself honestly.

''I don't disparage it. I throw myself into it. Why am I going to limit myself? If I see an interesting role with a good script and a good cast, why refuse to participate? After all, in the 19th century, Balzac and Dostoevsky wrote serials, which were the equivalent of what television is today.''

Ms. Montenegro said she would like to have had more opportunities to act in movies, ''since I am from a generation that, from the time we could sit in our mothers' laps, went to the movies three or four times a week to savor the dreams we saw on the screen.'' But financing is so hard to come by here, and theaters so suspicious of the commercial prospects of local product, that all but the most dedicated filmmakers give up.

So when she was offered the role of Dora, Ms. Montenegro said: ''I didn't hesitate a minute. I thought that this was a character so rich, so hard to come across in movies, or even the theater, that I couldn't afford to pass it up. This is a character living a deep internal crisis, a woman at the end of the line, the end of her career, who is scorned and is closing in on herself.''

If there is a burden to her prestige here at home, it is that she carries into tonight's Academy Awards ceremonies the hopes of 165 million of her fellow citizens at a time when Brazil is mired in a deep fiscal crisis and desperate for a piece of good news. Ever since the Oscar nominations were announced last month, she said, street sweepers, postal carriers and store clerks have been giving her the thumbs-up sign and shouting, ''We're praying for you!'' when they see her pass on the street.

To audiences in the United States and even her American peers, however, Ms. Montenegro seems to have appeared out of nowhere, ''like a creature arriving from Jupiter,'' as she puts it with an amused laugh. Struggling to place her in context, critics have compared her looks and technique to those of Giulietta Masina and Anna Magnani, the Italian actresses who were the bulwarks of the post-World War II neo-realist movement. Ms. Montenegro finds the description both flattering and incisive, and not just because ''my maternal grandparents came from Italy barely 30 years before I was born,'' in Jacarepagua, a Rio suburb.

''The Italians showed the third world that you didn't need a big budget to make a good movie, that there was an alternative to Hollywood's way of doing things, and that esthetic infected a whole generation of filmmakers in Brazil,'' she said. ''It was one of our directors from the Cinema Novo period, Glauber Rocha, who talked about needing just an idea in the head and a camera in the hand to make a movie.''

Indeed, Ms. Montenegro said she is an adherent of what another Brazilian director, Arnaldo Jabor, calls the ''esthetic of hunger.'' As she puts it, ''the country's social problems are always there,'' creating ''a world that is sad but very rich'' in potential for storytelling.

Though she now lives quite comfortably, Ms. Montenegro, born Arlette Pinheiro Esteves da Silva, grew up in a working class family, daughter of a mechanic for the Rio power company. At the age of 15, though, she answered a call to audition for the state radio station here, was selected for radio announcer's training, took the surname of her family doctor as her stage name, and has been working virtually nonstop ever since.

''She's not a Hepburn or a Redgrave, a grand dame,'' said Ms. Montenegro's daughter, Fernanda Torres, herself an actress. ''They call her the first lady of the Brazilian theater, which makes her laugh because she is much closer to being Dora than a diva. She has traveled on those crowded trains you see in 'Central Station' and knows those neighborhoods.''

Ms. Torres, who in 1986 won the best actress award at the Cannes International Film Festival for her performance in ''Eu Sei Que Vou Te Amar'' (''Love Me Forever and Ever''), described her mother as a ''strong and wise'' parent. Once on stage, however, Ms. Montenegro ''is ferocious, a lioness,'' said Ms. Torres, who played opposite her mother in ''The Crash and Flash Days,'' a 1992 play at Lincoln Center. ''She comes into a scene like Mike Tyson ready to bite off Evander Holyfield's ear.''

By all accounts, she is also demanding and relentless, on herself and others, in rehearsal. ''Everyone will be exhausted, but she will say 'Let's do one more run-through,' '' Ms. Torres said.

Nevertheless, ''working with her is a lot of fun,'' said Mr. Wilker, who has performed opposite Ms. Montenegro in several soap operas. ''At the same time that she is very cultured, intelligent and well read, she has a great sense of intuition, and as an actor it's quite enjoyable to be challenged to keep pace with that intuition and try to give something back to her.''

Ms. Montenegro recognizes that at her age and with her less than perfect command of English -- good enough for her to appear on ''Late Night with David Letterman'' recently, but not strong enough for her to perform in the language -- job offers from Hollywood are not likely to come showering down on her. But then making a career abroad has never been her top priority. And though ''this recognition by critics, audiences and the Academy is something so beautiful and unexpected,'' neither is it a priority now.

''We have great actors and actresses right here, and wonderful stories to tell,'' she said firmly. ''I wouldn't change my life experience for that of any actor in any other culture. Being an actor in Brazil is like living an adventure that never ends.''

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 2, Page 13 of the National edition with the headline: FILM; Eyes on Oscar: Brazil's 'National Treasure' . . .. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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