Pepita Meliá

Notable stage actress and soprano born in Alicante, Spain in 1893. She first attracted attention in 1909 when she won a gold medal at a beauty pageant in Valencia, but soon demonstrated her talents as a performer in countless stage musicals and zarzuelas. Her popularity spread to Latin America where she toured often as a headliner with her husband Benito Ciprián with whom she formed the Meliá-Cibrián Company, a successful theater enterprise. In 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, the Cibriáns performed frequently for the communist-infiltrated Republican government as part of a theater group identifying with the Popular Front. When the forces of General Francisco Franco won the war, and the Republicans disbanded, the couple went promptly into an extended tour of the American continent where they had long residencies, as well as much success, in Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, and Perú, until finally settling down in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In that country they raised their only son José Cibrián who would also become an accomplished actor. Starting in the late 1940's, Pepita was featured in a few films produced in Mexico and Argentina, usually in character roles, but she would remain, first and primarily, a stage actress. Her last acting credit on films was in "Los inocentes" (1963), an Argentinean-Spanish co-production directed by Juan Antonio Bardem.