Gabriel García Márquez is dead. The Colombian journalist, novelist, short story writer and screenwriter suffered from a lung and urinary tract infection that got him hospitalized on March 31. He was released on April 8 from the National Medical Sciences and Nutrition Institute in Mexico City. Jacqueline Pineda, a spokeswoman for the institute, told reporters that the author’s condition is “delicate due to his age,” but he “will recover at home.”
Gabo, how he was affectionately called, was taken to his house, but a little over a week since his home recovery began, his health failed him one last time. According to Mexican journalist, Fernanda Familiar, the writer’s heart stopped beating. She claims she was authorized by his family to disclose the news of his death. He will forever be remembered for his novels, such as “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967), “Autumn of the Patriarch” (1975) and “Love in the Time of Cholera” (1985), just to mention a few. He was the winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Gabo’s legacy will live forever through his work, which achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magic realism, which uses magical elements and events in otherwise ordinary and realistic situations. However, there’s an aspect of his life that not everyone knows, and it’s that García Márquez had a long history of involvement with film.
He was a film critic; he founded and served as executive director of the Film Institute in Havana, was the Head of the Latin American Film Foundation, and wrote several screenplays. Here’s a list of some of them.
1) For his first script he worked with Carlos Fuentes on Juan Rulfo's “El gallo de oro.”
2) García Márquez also wrote the screenplays for the film “Tiempo de morir” in 1966.
3) “Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes” (1988), was also written by Gabo.
4) He collaborated with the television series “Amores difíciles” (1991) by writing it too.
5) Gabo originally wrote his novel “Eréndira” as a screenplay. However, this version was lost and later replaced by what we know nowadays. Nevertheless, he decided he would give the screenplay another change, and asked Ruy Guerra to help him rewrite the script, and the film was released in Mexico in 1983.
6) His stories not only inspired him, but also other directors. In 1979, Mexican Miguel Littin directed “La Viuda de Montiel.”
7) Jaime Humberto Hermosillo did “María de mi corazón” in 1979.
8) Italian Francesco Rosi directed the movie “Cronaca di una morte annunciata,” based on “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” in 1987.
9) Mexican Arturo Ripstein did “El coronel no tiene quien le escriba” in 1998.
10) On November 16, 2007 an adaptation of “Love in the Time of Cholera” was released with the same name, by British director Mike Newell and written by Ronald Harwood. The film was filmed in Cartagena, Colombia.
11) Costa Rican filmmaker Hilda Hidalgo adapted García Márquez’s “Of Love and Other Demons.” Hidalgo is a graduate of the Film Institute of Havana, where Gabo used to impart screenplay worksh
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