Fernanda Torres On Her Golden Globes-Winning Performance In Walter Salles’ Oscar Contender ‘I’m Still Here’: “It’s A Hell Of A Character To Play”

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In Walter Salles’ Oscar-shortlisted film I’m Still Here, set in 1970 at the height of Brazil’s military dictatorship, Fernanda Torres plays an extraordinary mother: Eunice Paiva, who was left to raise five children alone after the disappearance of her activist husband Rubens (played by Selton Mello).

In the movie, as in life, however, Eunice refuses to be worn down by the scare tactics of the regime, mounting a campaign of defiance that would take up 25 years of the widow’s life before the authorities finally took responsibility for this historic crime and issued Ruben’s death certificate in 1996.

The real Eunice never broke down, at least never in public. “Photographers wanted to take pictures of us looking sad, so we started a battle against the media,” explained her son Marcelo, who wrote the memoir that Salles’ film is based on. “The family of Rubens Paiva does not cry in front of the cameras.” Torres’ own mother, Fernanda Montenegro, is an equally formidable figure; a legend on the Brazilian arts scene, Montenegro was herself a Golden Globes nominee, for another film directed by Walter Salles (1999’s Central Station).

Unlike her daughter, Montenegro lost out (to Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love), but last August, at the age of 95, the actress hit a milestone of a different kind, making the Guinness Book of World Records for The Largest Audience of a Book Reading (Portuguese Language) after a reading excerpts from French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s writings to a crowd of 15,000 people.