Emilio Echevarría, the standout Mexican actor who starred as the hitman known as El Chivo (The Goat) in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Amores Perros, has died. He was 80.
Echevarría died Saturday, the Mexican Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences announced. No other details of his death were immediately available.
The three-time Ariel Award nominee appeared in two other recent classics of Mexican cinema: Y tu mamá también (2001), the coming-of-age road film directed and co-written by Alfonso Cuarón, and Iñárritu’s complex Babel (2006), which was nominated for the best picture Oscar.
Echevarría also had turns as the enigmatic British agent Raoul, who doubles as the manager of a Havana cigar factory, in the James Bond film Die Another Day (2002), and as Mexican president Antonio López de Santa Anna in John Lee Hancock’s The Alamo (2004).
In the psychological drama Amores Perros (2000), which marked Iñárritu’s feature directorial debut, Echevarría stood out as El Chivo, who first appears in the film as a homeless man before the character is revealed to be a former guerrilla fighter turned hitman.
Emilio Echevarría as El Chivo in 2000’s Amores Perros.
Lions Gate Films/Courtesy Everett Collection
Born in Mexico City on July 3, 1944, Echevarría studied accounting at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and worked as a numbers guy for Televisa before embarking on an acting career in the theater in his early 30s.
“One day, when I was 31, I received a phone call from a woman friend inviting me to be in a play. She knew I wasn’t an actor,” he recalled in a 2008 interview. “I told her I worked all day at my office. She told me rehearsals and shows were at night. I asked no further and I took up the invitation. At the first rehearsal, I knew that that was the most pleasurable calling and work I could do.”
With his career in full bloom, he starred as Venustiano Carranza, a president of his country during the Mexican Revolution, in the 2011 historical Televisa miniseries El Encanto del Águila.
He also recurred as the maestro Ignacio Rivera, mentor of Gael García Bernal’s Rodrigo, in 2015-16 on the Prime Video series Mozart in the Jungle. (The actors had worked together in Amores Perros, Y tu mamá también and Babel.)
Echevarría received his Ariel noms (Mexico’s version of the Oscars) for his performances in Dying in the Gulf (1990), A Monster With a Thousand Heads (2016) and The Chosen (2018).
Survivors include his daughter, Lourdes Echevarría, an actress.
On X, Amores Perros screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga called Echevarría “a tremendous actor and an even better human being. A dear friend. I had the privilege of collaborating with him on several productions. A great man.”
Rhett Bartlett contributed to this report.
