Renée Victor has–will always have–one of those faces. You will recognize her immediately…and not just her face, but her voice, the characters she played, and the strong, brave spirit she always embodied.
For almost forty years, in almost a hundred different appearances, we all had the real joy of seeing Renée perform as a truly memorable dancer, singer, actress, and voice actor. In many of those roles she stepped into characters who were maids, madams, and especially abuelitas, but she was never the stereotype. The characters she played were always something more, something special and richer than we had a right to expect.
She is probably best remembered for her voice performance as Abuelita in Pixar’s Coco, and for many episodes as the no-nonsense maid to Mary Louise Parker on Weeds. But she was also the voice of all the lizard people in the wildly popular video game Skyrim, the Abuelatron on Futurama, and the kind, brave, and doomed abuela in the cult horror classic Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones. And that’s barely the beginning.
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She was also a friend of mine and of Se Fija! I was lucky enough to interview her more than once, and you can watch those interviews here and here. We spoke and texted often; we worked together on some fun book-reading projects, and we were planning to get together again when she finally succumbed to lymphoma at her home in Sherman Oaks.
Her life was truly remarkable. She sang and danced as part of the “Latina Sonny and Cher” with her husband in the Sixties and Seventies, appearing with legends like Xavier Cugat and Perez Prado. She hosted a groundbreaking television series for KTLA-Los Angeles called Pacesetters, in the Seventies–a vital part of the early Chicano Power movement. She appeared in more television shows than you can count, from Scarecrow and Mrs. King and the original Matlock early in her career to movies like The Apostle and A Night in Old Mexico with her dear friend Robert Duvall as time went on, to a memorable turn on ER. A continuing role on the animated version of The Addams Family, and more recent television appearances on everything from Vida to Gentefied to Snowpiercer to A Million Little Things, to With Love. She was working on a feature film called A Time of Love and War that is still in production, and she was slated to return to the role of Abuelita in the announced but not-yet-begun sequel to Coco as well. It will not be the same without her.
