Sagunto honours actors Pepe Alba and Anita Blanch on Actor's Day
Every 26 August, on International Actor's Day, Sagunto remembers stage actor Pepe Alba, born in the city in 1885, and Mexican film actress Anita Blanch, who had strong ties to Sagunto.
Every 26 August marks International Actor's Day, a date set aside to recognise the contribution of the performing arts to culture and society. In Sagunto, a city with a long theatrical tradition that goes back to Roman times, this date carries special meaning: two of its most notable performers, Pepe Alba and Anita Blanch, shaped 20th-century acting history in very different ways — one through Valencian theatre, the other through Mexican cinema.
Pepe Alba was born in Sagunto in 1885, into a modest family linked to esparto-grass craftwork (weaving baskets, ropes and mats from a local grass, a traditional trade in the area). Before fully devoting himself to acting, he showed artistic talent in fields as different as painting and stage design, but it was theatre that brought him his greatest recognition. He excelled across a wide range of registers — sainet valencià (traditional Valencian comic theatre), comedy, zarzuela (Spanish light opera) and revue — showing an unusually broad ability to move between very different acting styles.
His career, tied to the golden age of popular Valencian theatre, went beyond acting alone: he also worked as a theatre producer and playwright, and over the course of his working life he premiered hundreds of plays. His legacy still lives on today through Sagunto City Council, which continues to award the Pepe Alba Theatre Prize as part of the city's Ciudad de Sagunto Literary Awards, keeping his name attached to the local stage many decades after his own time performing on it.
If Pepe Alba represents the success of Valencian theatre within its own region, Anita Blanch represents the international reach of talent born in Sagunto. Born on 26 July 1910 as Ana María Blanch Ruiz, the municipal announcement places her birth in Sagunto, although other sources, including Wikipedia, place it instead in the city of Valencia — a detail that should be treated with caution until a source settles the discrepancy one way or the other. What is not in doubt is that she emigrated to Mexico while still young, where she would go on to build one of the most brilliant careers in 20th-century Mexican film and theatre.
Blanch made her film debut in 1935 with the cult film 'Luponini de Chicago', before becoming one of the leading actresses of Mexican cinema's Golden Age. Her roles in films such as 'La barraca', 'Tlayucan' and 'El abanico de Lady Windermere' made her one of the most recognised performers of her generation, and over the course of her career she earned several nominations at Mexico's Ariel Awards (the country's top film honour, roughly equivalent to Spain's Goya). She combined this film work with an active, ongoing presence in theatre and television, staying professionally busy for more than five decades.
Anita Blanch died on 23 April 1983 in Mexico City, at the age of 75, leaving behind a name that today ranks among the great performers of Mexican culture — without that success erasing her roots in Sagunto.
In a city known worldwide for its Roman Theatre (Teatro Romano) and for the Sagunt a Escena festival that fills it every summer, the careers of Pepe Alba and Anita Blanch are a reminder that the local performing-arts tradition is not only architectural heritage. It is also a story about people and about artistic vocation that crossed borders — from Valencian theatre stages to Mexican film studios on the other side of the Atlantic.
International Actor's Day is therefore an occasion to honour the memory of these two notable figures from Sagunto, each from their own era and their own discipline, whose work carried the city's name far beyond its streets and its historic theatre.
According to El Periódico de Aquí, with additional data from Wikipedia on Anita Blanch's biography.