Luís Miguel Cintra

Portuguese actor and director, who graduated from Lisbon University in romance philology and studied at the Bristol Old Vic. Internationally known for acting in Manoel de Oliveira’s films, he is associated with the distinguished theatre company Teatro da Cornucópia, which he co-founded in Lisbon in 1973 with Jorge Silva Melo. Cintra has managed the company with set designer Cristina Reis since the late 1970s. An attractive and brilliant actor, Cintra is also an imaginative director whose work is based on three major principles: the primacy of the literary text and a passionate belief in the word; the idea that theatre should be an analysis of life ‘tortured by the idea of truth and meaning’; and the assumption that theatre should accept and show its own theatricality. Choosing Portuguese classics (Vicente, Silva, and Garrett), Shakespeare (for instance Cymbeline, 2000), or contemporary writers like Edward Bond (War Trilogy, 1987) and Heiner Müller (Der Auftrag, 1984 and 1992), his aesthetic choices rely on Marcuse’s idea that great literature can be the spiritual rock against greed, relativism, and the decadence of modernity. —answers.com