Antonio Aguilar

Pascual Antonio Aguilar Barraza, actor and singer: born Villanueva, Mexico 17 May 1919; married 1960 Flor Silvestre (two sons); died Mexico City 19 June 2007.

Antonio Aguilar was, for several decades, Mexico's most popular singer and film star, appearing in 167 movies and putting out more than 150 albums of popular ranchera music, many of them bought by Hispanics in the United States. A fine horseman since his childhood, he was known as "el charro de México", invariably appearing or performing in the traditional giant sombrero and tight, sequinned outfit of the charro, a horse rancher and rodeo rider, now most often seen on street-singing mariachi bands.

In most of his films, initially during the "golden era" of Mexican cinema in the 1950s, Aguilar rode a prancing stallion into town, punched out stubbly, tequila-swigging bandidos, serenaded the girl with a tear-jerking ballad from below her balcony and won her heart. Mexican macho men wanted to be like him and women wanted to ride off with him into the sunset.

He also won the heart of the beautiful Flor Silvestre, who became one of Mexico's most-loved screen stars and singers, appearing with Aguilar in many films and selling around 150 albums of her own. Their long, happy marriage, and Aguilar's image as a singing cowboy, led to their being billed at joint concerts, particularly in the United States, as "Mexico's Roy Rogers and Dale Evans". From the 1960s, Aguilar's popularity soared after he combined his concerts with charreadas, or rodeos, with roping, bull-riding, equestrian clowns and a chance for Aguilar himself to demonstrate his formidable riding skills.

Even at the age of 78, in 1997 Aguilar became the first Hispanic artist to sell out Madison Square Garden in New York for six nights in a row, bringing tears to the eyes of nostalgic Mexican-Americans with his songs of unrequited love and mucho "ay, ay, ay, ay". Three years later, aged 81, he received a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame for selling over 25 million records.

Pascual Antonio Aguilar Barraza was born in his family's 18th-century hacienda in the village of Tayahua, in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, in 1919, learning to ride almost as soon as he could walk and singing while he rode. As a youth, he was said to have hiked north and swum across the Rio Grande as a mojado, a "wetback" or illegal immigrant, sleeping rough in Los Angeles and working as a waiter to earn enough to study acting and singing, with the initial intention of going into opera.

When he returned to Mexico in 1945, he started off with small parts in opera until a friend told him: "Use that powerful voice to sing the songs of the people. Be a mariachi." He did, got a breakthrough on a 1950 radio show, cut his first album and was offered his first film role, in 1950, alongside the Mexican legends of the "golden era", Pedro Infante and Marga Lopez, in Un Rincón cerca del Cielo ("A Corner near Heaven"). His first starring role came in Tierra de Hombres ("Land of Men") in 1956.

Hugely popular by the Sixties, usually producing and often writing his own scripts to fit around his songs, Aguilar also played the roles of many historic Mexican characters, notably the revolutionaries Emiliano Zapata, in a 1970 film of that title, and Pancho Villa.

In 1969, he was recruited for his first major Hollywood movie, The Undefeated, starring John Wayne and Rock Hudson, as a Union colonel and a Confederate colonel respectively, in the ragged wake of the Civil War. Aguilar played the Mexican General Rojas in the film, as usual in Hollywood a bad guy, who held Hudson's Confederate troops hostage. After he had seen the final cut, Aguilar expressed disilussionment with the stereotyping of Mexicans in Hollywood and declined to work there again.

Last year, knowing he was ill, Aguilar made a "farewell tour" of major US cities, performing with his wife, sons and horses in a concert and charreada, although he himself could no longer ride. One of his two sons, Pepe, is now one of Mexico's most popular singers, and the other, Antonio Jnr ("Toño"), is also a successful singer and actor.

Phil Davison