Elizabeth Peña, Actress on the Big and Small Screens, Dies at 55
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Elizabeth Peña and Chris Cooper in John Sayles’s “Lone Star” (1996), for which she won an Independent Spirit Award.CreditAlan Papp/Castle Rock Entertainment
Elizabeth Peña, an actress who appeared in major studio pictures like “Rush Hour,” independent films like John Sayles’s generational drama “Lone Star,” and a host of television shows, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. She was 55.
Her manager, Gina Rugolo, confirmed her death, saying it followed a brief illness.
Ms. Peña played everything from love interest to comedic sidekick in movies and on television for 35 years. She was a demolition specialist alongside Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in “Rush Hour” (1998). As Pilar Cruz, a history teacher who rekindles a romance with a small-town Texas sheriff in “Lone Star” (1996), she won an Independent Spirit Award for best supporting actress. “The sultry Ms. Peña gives an especially vivid performance as the character who is most unsettled by the shadows of the past,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times in 1996.
Her first major film role was as Tim Robbins’s lover in Adrian Lyne’s psychological thriller “Jacob’s Ladder” (1990). She reportedly won the part over stars like Julia Roberts, Andie MacDowell and Madonna.
A television regular, Ms. Peña appeared on shows like “L.A. Law,” “American Dad” and “Boston Public.” In the mid-1980s, she starred as a maid who marries her employer to stay in the United States in the short-lived sitcom “I Married Dora,” and starting in 2000 she played a hairdresser in “Resurrection Blvd.,” the Showtime drama about an upwardly mobile Latino family.
More recently she played the mother of Sofia Vergara’s character on the hit ABC sitcom “Modern Family,” even though she was only 13 years older than Ms. Vergara.
Elizabeth Peña was born in Elizabeth, N.J., on Sept. 23, 1959. Her father, Mario, was a Cuban actor, director and playwright, and Ms. Peña spent much of her childhood in Cuba before returning to the United States. She graduated from what is now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan.
She performed in a production of “Romeo and Juliet,” translated into Spanish by the poet Pablo Neruda, at the Gramercy Theater in 1979 and made her film debut in the Spanish-language film “El Super” that year.
Ms. Peña went on to play the mistreated wife of Ritchie Valens’s half brother in the biopic “La Bamba” (1987); Jamie Lee Curtis’s confidante in the action film “Blue Steel” (1989); and Richard Dreyfuss’s and Bette Midler’s maid in the comedy “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” (1986).
She also did voice-over work in the animated film “The Incredibles” (2004) and cartoons like “Justice League.”
She married Hans Rolla in 1994. He survives her, as does their son, Kaelan; their daughter, Fiona Rolla; her mother, Estella Margarita Peña; and a sister, Tania Peña.
Ms. Peña said that she researched Mexican-American culture to prepare for her part in “Lone Star.”
“I recorded people’s voices to get the proper inflection,” she told The Ottawa Citizen in 1996. “I crossed the border a whole bunch to collect a lot of history. I would sit for hours looking at the women, how they dressed.”
“In the United States, all Spanish-speaking people are lumped into one category,” she continued. “But we’re all so different.”
William Lopez, who was convicted of murder in Brooklyn and imprisoned for 23 years before being exonerated last year, died on Sept. 20 in the Bronx. He was 55.
He had suffered an asthma attack and died at Jacobi Medical Center, his wife, Alice Lopez, said. He lived in the Bronx.
In 1989, Mr. Lopez was convicted of shooting a drug dealer in a crack house in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, with a shotgun. No weapon or forensic evidence was found at the scene, and prosecutors relied on the testimony of two witnesses.
One witness, a crack courier, testified that the gunman was a “tall, dark, black man,” about 6 feet 3 inches tall. Mr. Lopez was more than half a foot shorter and had light skin. When asked to look around the courtroom and identify the gunman, the witness said she did not see him, though Mr. Lopez was sitting at the defense table.
The other witness had been bingeing on crack cocaine just before the murder occurred. She later recanted her testimony, revealing that she had discussed a deal with the prosecution under which she would testify in exchange for a reduced sentence on a drug charge.
The conviction was overturned in 2013 by Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis in Federal District Court in Brooklyn. In his ruling, he said that the Brooklyn district attorney’s office had been “overzealous and deceitful,” that Mr. Lopez’s lawyers had been “indolent and ill prepared,” and that the ruling of the original judge was “incomprehensible.”
Mr. Lopez was born on Jan. 18, 1959, in Brooklyn. He and his wife married in 1993. She survives him, as do his mother, Lydia; a brother, Eugene; a daughter, Crystal; and three grandchildren.
Throughout his incarceration, Mr. Lopez maintained his innocence. In 2012 he contacted Jeffrey Deskovic, an advocate for the wrongfully imprisoned, and Mr. Deskovic’s foundation began investigating his case. (Mr. Deskovic had been exonerated after serving time for rape and murder.)
“It had serious problems, as many trials do,” Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, told The New York Times in 2013. Mr. Hynes nevertheless filed a brief to overturn Judge Garaufis’s decision. The brief was withdrawn by his successor, Kenneth P. Thompson, who defeated Mr. Hynes in his bid for re-election.
“It feels great to be back on Earth,” Mr. Lopez said after his release. “I’m looking forward to restoring my life as best as I can.”
At his death, Mr. Lopez was preparing a lawsuit against the district attorney’s office.
Emilio Botín, Who Built Up Santander Bank, Dies at 79
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Under Mr. Botín, Banco Santander’s assets rose to 1.1 trillion euros ($1.42 trillion) last year from 20 billion euros in 1998.Credit Juan Manuel Serrano Arce/Getty Images
Updated, 8:27 p.m. | Emilio Botín, who transformed Banco Santander from a regional, family-controlled bank into one of Europe’s largest financial institutions, died on Tuesday at his home outside Madrid. He was 79.
The bank confirmed the death in a statement on Wednesday, saying Mr. Botín had had a heart attack. Mr. Botín, whose personal wealth was estimated by Forbes magazine at $1.1 billion, lived in Somosaguas, a wealthy district in Pozuelo de Alarcón, a suburb of Madrid.
Mr. Botín ran Banco Santander for three decades after succeeding his father as executive chairman in 1986, continuing a family dynasty at the bank that began in 1909, when his grandfather became chairman. Both father and grandfather were also named Emilio.
Once in charge, Mr. Botín caught his domestic rivals flat-footed by raising the interest paid on deposits at his bank, a move that greatly increased the market share for what had been a middle-of-the-pack institution with almost no international presence.
Then, in a spate of deal making, Mr. Botín went from one takeover to the next, maintaining a rapid acquisition pace even during the early stages of the financial crisis in 2008. Banco Santander’s assets soared from 20 billion euros in 1998 to 1.1 trillion euros ($1.42 trillion) at the end of last year, which is about the value of Spain’s gross domestic product.
Besides Spain, Santander now has a huge commercial banking presence in Brazil and Britain, as well as a sizable one in the United States after its takeover of Sovereign Bank, based in Philadelphia. (Sovereign changed its name to Santander Bank in 2013 and is now based in Boston.)
Its ability to merge and grow made Santander the envy of banks worldwide, even if the expansion involved some risky bets. Among them was Mr. Botín’s decision to focus on Brazil even after the 2002 election of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, a former trade unionist who some feared would turn against banks. Banco Santander now earns about a quarter of its profit from Brazil.
Mr. Botín’s track record allowed him to retain almost unchallenged leadership of the bank, even as its expansion and takeovers diluted his family stake to about 2 percent of the equity.
On Wednesday, the board of Banco Santander unanimously appointed Mr. Botín’s daughter Ana Patricia Botín its next executive chairwoman. Ms. Botín, 53, started as an investment banker at JPMorgan Chase in New York before returning to Spain and taking charge of Banesto, a failed Spanish bank that her father took over in a state auction in 1994. More recently, Ms. Botín was based in London, where she was in charge of the bank’s British operations.
In contrast to bankers in other European countries, where they are largely anonymous figures, Mr. Botín wielded an almost cultlike influence in Spain. Although he avoided social events and made relatively few public utterances, his comments made headlines.
For example, his pronouncement that the Spanish economy was on the mend was regarded as a crucial vote of confidence in support of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s re-election bid in 2008.
In an online article on Wednesday in El País, Spain’s leading daily newspaper, Luis de Guindos, Spain’s economy minister, revealed that Mr. Botín’s support had been important in the government’s decision not to negotiate a full government bailout with international creditors in 2012, shortly after Spain was forced to seek European rescue money for Bankia and other suffering savings banks.
Mr. de Guindos wrote that while under intense pressure to opt for a bailout, he received a phone call from Mr. Botín telling him to resist. “You know what you have to do and I will back you,” he quoted Mr. Botín as saying.
As Mr. Botín integrated his various acquisitions, replacing well-known brands like Banesto and Abbey National with that of Santander, he insisted that employees wear the bank’s signature red — ties for men, scarves for women — on public occasions.
Emilio Botín-Sanz de Sautuola y García de los Ríos was born on Oct. 1, 1934, in Santander, a resort town on the northern coast, where his family’s bank was headquartered. (It is now based outside Madrid.) The town was once the summer vacation spot of the Spanish royal family.
By royal decree, Queen Isabel II authorized the bank’s founding in 1857, mainly to help finance maritime trade between Spain and Latin America.
Mr. Botín studied law and then economics before joining the bank at 24 and beginning a rise through the executive ranks. He was in his early 50s when he took over from his father, in 1986, a moment that coincided with Spain’s joining the European Union, which brought in substantial European subsidies to modernize Spain’s economy.
In the last three years, Mr. Botín kept Banco Santander on the sidelines of a Spanish consolidation process in which suffering savings banks that received bailout money were then absorbed by healthier commercial banks.
In 2011, as Spain’s banking crisis was nearing its peak, it was revealed that Mr. Botín and his family were the target of a tax investigation that ended when the family agreed to pay about 200 million euros, now equivalent to about $258 million, in back taxes to avoid tax evasion charges.
While little was disclosed about the settlement, investigators said the family’s undeclared money had originated in a Swiss bank account that Mr. Botín’s father had opened after leaving Spain with part of his wealth in late 1936, after the onset of the Spanish Civil War.
In addition to his daughter Ana Patricia, Mr. Botín’s survivors include his wife, Paloma O’Shea, a classical pianist, patron of the arts and founder of the Queen Sofía College of Music in Madrid; and five other children, Carmen, Emilio, Carolina, Paloma and Francisco Javier. Spanish news media said he had 17 grandchildren. Even after turning his bank into an international behemoth, Mr. Botín remained loyal to the managers who had helped run the family business when it was virtually unknown outside Spain, said Manuel Romera, a finance professor at the IE business school in Madrid.
Mr. Botín’s management team, Mr. Romera said, was “a bit like a Pretorian guard of people whom he has trusted for many years, and who are very Spanish.”
Sergio Rodrigues, whose tables, chairs and other living accessories set the standard for modern furniture design in his native Brazil and who forged a path to the international market for his countrymen, died on Monday at his home in Rio de Janeiro. He was 86.
The death, from liver failure, was confirmed by his company, Sergio Rodrigues Design and Furniture.
Mr. Rodrigues began his career in the 1950s, when Brazilian interior design had not kept pace with the modernism of the nation’s leading architects, like Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa. Mr. Rodrigues was known for designs that made use of distinctive woods indigenous to Brazil, including jacaranda, peroba and imbuia, and were said to reflect the sociable, witty nature of the Brazilian national character.
“He was a person who knew how to translate the Brazilian soul in furniture, with its humorous and relaxed way,” Baba Vacaro, the owner of Design Mix Studio in São Paulo, said in an interview. “When people think of Brazilian design, the first thing that comes in our head is the work of Sergio.”
Among Mr. Rodrigues’s more vivid creations arethe Taja line, a variety of wooden outdoor chairs and tables, and indoor armchairs like the Voltaire, with a solid wood frame and a voluptuous, cup-shaped upholstered seat with enclosing panels at head level.
He is best known for the Mole (the word means “soft” in Portuguese), a low-slung, wood-frame chair perfect for lounging, with strap-supported upholstery that drapes luxuriously over the arms. Created in the late 1950s, it won an international furniture competition in Cantu, Italy, in 1961. Mr. Rodrigues’s designs are featured in the Brazilian Embassy in Rome and in the Brazilian national theater in Brasília.
Sergio Roberto Santos Rodrigues was born into an intellectual and artistic Rio de Janeiro family on Sept. 22, 1927. His grandfather, Mário, was a well-known journalist; his uncle, Nelson, was a playwright and novelist; his father, Roberto, was a graphic artist. He graduated from architecture school in Rio de Janeiro in 1951 and founded Oca, an influential company that helped spur the pursuit of craft and furniture design in Brazil.
Mr. Rodrigues’s first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Vera Beatriz Rodrigues; two daughters, Adriana and Angela; a son, Roberto; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
“You know he is called the father of Brazilian design,” said Carlos Junqueira, a native of São Paulo and the owner of Espasso, a dealer dedicated to Brazilian furniture with showrooms in New York and Los Angeles. “Before him there was no importance given to furniture design in Brazil. He was the first to whom people looked for inspiration.”
Julio Grondona, who ruled over Argentina’s soccer association for 35 years and wielded influence far beyond it as one of the most powerful figures in FIFA, international soccer’s governing body, died on Wednesday in Buenos Aires. He was 82.
The cause was complications of an aortic aneurysm, said Ernesto Cherquis Bialo, a spokesman for the Argentine Football Association.
At his death Mr. Grondona was FIFA’s senior vice president, a position considered second only to the president, currently Sepp Blatter.
Known in Argentina as Don Julio, Mr. Grondona became president of the Argentine Football Association in 1979, when the country was in the throes of the so-called Dirty War, in which the military dictatorship hunted down suspected opponents, thousands of whom were never seen again.
After democracy was re-established in 1983, Mr. Grondona consolidated and expanded his power through a succession of civilian governments, economic crises and corruption scandals surrounding FIFA, from which he emerged relatively unscathed.
Often photographed wearing a gold pinkie ring inscribed with the words “todo pasa,” or everything passes, Mr. Grondona negotiated an array of lucrative sponsorship and media deals. He was feared by many in Argentina.
“The power isn’t mine,” he once said. “They give it to me. The others feel that I have power, and that’s what counts.”
Julio Humberto Grondona, the eldest of six children, was born on Sept. 18, 1931, in the port city of Avellaneda, near Buenos Aires. He abandoned engineering studies in his early 20s to take over his family’s hardware store, Lombardi y Grondona, after his father died. The business made him wealthy.
In 1957, he and his brother Héctor founded the soccer club Arsenal, whose stadium, in Avellaneda, was named in Mr. Grondona’s honor. He joined FIFA’s executive committee in 1988.
Mr. Grondona could be combative if not belligerent. In 2003 he was denounced as anti-Semitic after he questioned the place of Jews in top soccer leagues, saying they did not work hard enough. “I do not believe a Jew can ever be a referee at this level,” he said.
He also expressed contrition for describing the English as “liars” and “pirates” in 2011 as England prepared a bid to host the World Cup in 2018. (Russia was awarded the event.) He was a vocal supporter of Argentina’s territorial claim on the Falkland Islands, called the Malvinas Islands by Argentines — a dispute with Britain that led to the country’s defeat in the Falklands War in 1982.
Mr. Grondona told reporters in 2011 that he had bluntly laid out his views to English soccer officials. “I said: ‘Let us be brief. If you give back the Malvinas Islands, which belong to us, you will get my vote,’ ” he said. “They then became sad and left.”
In his own country, Mr. Grondona was often criticized for his ironhanded manner but also hailed for his contributions to Argentine soccer. Among other things, he had a hand in the national team’s run to its second World Cup title, in 1986, when it was led by the superstar Diego Maradona, and oversaw the construction of a world-class soccer training complex near Buenos Aires.
Still, he hewed to controversy through the most recent World Cup, which concluded in Brazil in July with Germany’s defeat of Argentina in the final.
Known for his public feuds with Maradona, who once coached Argentina’s national team, Mr. Grondona said that Argentina was able to squeak out a 1-0 victory over Iran in a World Cup match in June only after Maradona had left the stands. Mr. Grondona called him a “jinx.” Maradona responded with a crude hand gesture that was shown on television.
Maradona took to Facebook this week to comment on Mr. Grondona’s death, expressing his condolences.
Mr. Grondona’s wife, Nélida Pariani, died in 2012. He is survived by three children, Liliana, Julio and Humberto.
In June, just before the World Cup began, Mr. Grondona spoke of his lasting bond with soccer, telling the German news service DPA, “When I leave FIFA, it will be to go to the cemetery.”
