Jorge Lavelli, the former Franco-Argentine director responsible for The hillsone of France’s leading theaters, died on Monday in Paris at the age of 90, sources from the Argentine Embassy in France informed Efe on Tuesday.
Lavelli (Buenos Aires, 1932) had a versatile career which led him to direct both theatrical works by authors and Fernando Arrabal (Picnic in the countryside, 1966), Eugene Ionesco (Massacre Games, 1970) y Federico García Lorca (Doña Rosita the bachelorette, 1980, Madrid), as well as lyrical pieces (The Traviata y Madame Butterflyamong other).
The director, who arrived in Paris in the 1950s thanks to an Argentine scholarship with which he studied at the Théâtre des Nations University in Paris, won 1963 the grand prize dedicated to young theater companies thanks to its staging of The weddingde Witold Gombrowicz.
Ten years after acquiring French nationality, in 1987, Lavelli crowned his career by becoming the founding director of the National Theater of The hills(20th arrondissement of Paris), one of the six main theaters in France in which he was in charge between 1987 and 1996.
In his extensive resume, several collaborations with theaters and institutions outside France stand out, such as the Argentine Colon Theater (in 2014 he digested the opera Idomeneo, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) or the National Dramatic Center of Madrid.