He kept an active spiritual and activist life. Watch this clip in “ Raúl Juliá: The World’s a Stage,” a special co-presentation of " VOCES" and " American Masters" on PBS.Ĥ. Raúl Juliá plays Petruchio and Meryl Streep plays Kate in Joseph Papp's 1978 Shakespeare in the Park production of The Taming of the Shrew. Raúl Juliá and Meryl Streep Go Head-to-Head
“I realized I could bring my own culture, my own Puerto Rican background, my own Spanish culture and rhythm to Shakespeare because Shakespeare is too big to be put into one way…” he said. In an interview, Juliá said he soon noticed he could play these parts differently than have been traditionally staged. Joseph Papp, the man behind the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater, saw in Juliá what others couldn’t and first offered the avowed Shakespeare and Cervantes fan a chance to work as a house manager for his production of “Hamlet.” Just a few years later, Juliá would become one of the main stars in Papp’s productions of “The Taming of the Shrew,” where he shared the stage with Meryl Streep, and “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” a musical variation of the play. He got his big acting break by playing Shakespeare. Juliá’s face shows his frustration at having to explain - probably not for the first time - that he had learned English when he was in elementary school.ģ. The prejudice against his accent even extended to the press, as seen in one cringeworthy early interview when a reporter assumes he didn’t speak English when he first came to New York. As his contemporaries like Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro landed history-making roles and even Juliá’s acting school classmate Christopher Walken was starting to get regular work, Juliá struggled to find bit parts that weren’t demeaning or wouldn’t be cast in roles that weren’t exclusively written for a Latino. Juliá’s road to Broadway and Hollywood was not an easy one.Īs bad as things are now for Latinx actors in Hollywood, things were even worse in Juliá’s time. Juliá took Bean up on his invitation and in 1964, he moved to New York in the middle of a blizzard.Ģ. It was at one of these performances at a hotel that he was spotted by a visiting New York performer, Orson Bean, who invited him to pursue his dreams in the big city. As he was starting to get his acting career off the ground, he also started to sing in lounges and nightclubs. Before he was an actor, Raúl Juliá was known as a singer.īorn in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Juliá caught the acting bug at a young age, and started taking theater classes in high school. A preview of “ Raúl Juliá: The World’s a Stage,” a special co-presentation of " VOCES" and " American Masters" on PBS.ġ.
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