Helena Félix

She was born in Porto on 10 April 1920 and studied singing for two years at the Porto Music Conservatoire. She made her debut as an actress in 1941, in the revue O jogo da laranjinha (The Little Orange Game), at the Teatro da Trindade, and from 1949 to 1961 she acted in more than fifty plays with the Amélia Rey-Colaço/Robles Monteiro Company, at the D. Maria II National Theatre.¹

From 1961 to 1964 she studied acting in London, where she met Luzia Maria Martins, who was working at the BBC.¹ Back in Lisbon, in 1964 they founded, with Valentina Trigo de Sousa, the Teatro Estúdio de Lisboa (Lisbon Studio Theatre, TEL), the city’s first independent theatre company, which made its debut in December that year with Joana de Lorena (Joan of Lorraine), by Maxwell Anderson, in the Feira Popular pavilion that would become the Vasco Santana Theatre.¹² The two women’s project was to bring new authors to Portugal, a restrained style of acting with rigorous diction, and a theatre committed to social intervention.³

She received the Bordalo Prizes of the Casa da Imprensa (Press House) for best actress in 1968 and in 1970, for A Louca de Chaillot (The Madwoman of Chaillot), by Jean Giraudoux, and Quem é esta mulher (Who Is This Woman), by Marguerite Duras, and the Medal of Cultural Merit in 1990; she also made films, from Aqui, Portugal (Here, Portugal, 1947) to A Noite e a Madrugada (The Night and the Dawn, 1985).¹

She died in Lisbon in March 1991, the year the TEL came to an end.¹³ The following year, Lisbon City Council gave her name to a street next to the Feira Popular theatre, inaugurated on International Women’s Day 1993, with the street sign unveiled by Luzia Maria Martins.¹