Francisco Martínez Allende

Actor

Cangas de Onís, Oviedo, Spain

November 13, 1906

Biography

Francisco Martínez Allende (Cangas de Onís, Oviedo, Spain; 1906 – Buenos Aires, Argentina; August 25, 1954) was a Spanish actor, theater director, and playwright who became a naturalized Argentine citizen. He was one of the Spanish theater figures whose careers were eclipsed by exile after the Spanish Civil War. At the age of fifteen, he emigrated to Buenos Aires, where he studied and began his theatrical career as an actor and writer, eventually meeting Federico García Lorca. In Spain, he directed the Tribuna Theater and was in charge of theatrical groups for the Republican Army. After the fall of the Second Spanish Republic, he went into exile in Cuba and later returned to Argentina, where he worked in theater and film until his death.