‘Cigarettes killed Pepê’, says friend of Pedro Paulo Rangel

He was short and fun. Cult, reader, compulsive viewer of TV series. He’s kind of grouchy and rowdy, but most of the time, he’s playing grouchy just to poke some asshole. With friends, he was pure love and delicacy. Pedro Paulo Rangel, who passed away on Wednesday, had a gigantic talent, that inexplicable power to transform himself into many and translate all emotions.

Award-winning, he won Shell in 2020 for his work as a whole – and it was precisely the edition of the award that did not have a party, because of the pandemic. Caspite, he said. And laugh.

Pepê didn’t have the slightest problem commenting on his health issues, and took the opportunity to campaign against cigarettes, an addiction that brought him the cruel COPD, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Even though he stopped smoking in 1988, the disease caught up with him four years later. For some time now, he gave in to the enormous difficulty of walking and bought a motorized wheelchair. And he invited me to ride a scooter with him in Copacabana – sitting on his lap, of course. Unforgettable.

Onstage, no one would say he was out of breath. He was religiously doing physical therapy, researching any and all experimental treatments, even considering a lung transplant, but that was no longer possible. In 2018, when he set up his last production, “O Ator e o Lobo”, with his own texts mixed with those of the Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes, he did a monologue for an hour and a half, standing, moving, and very well. In everyday life, however, a few steps left him breathless. He will understand. It’s the actor’s magic. The actor’s boner.

He had a lingering enthusiasm. When I started writing the scripts for the musical podcast “Torna Viagem”, with Portuguese and Brazilian music, I only thought of his voice telling the adventures of musicians and composers from here and overseas. After all, her memoir was called “O Samba e o Fado”, written by journalist Tania Carvalho.

He recorded the entire first season, which aired on Rádio MEC and Rádio Cultura, and is now airing on Antena 2 in Lisbon. She had invitations for miniseries and was rejoicing in challenges to her precarious health – she still heard little, in a deafness resulting from the firing of a blank weapon, without protection, throughout the season of “Aurora da minha vida”, by Naum Alves de Souza, in the 1980s.

Pepê’s house was a cave of treasures. The last time I was there, he showed me the wooden box where gold was kept during the time of D. Pedro I. Lately, he had gone on a tremendous diet and became very slim again. And, as if the phenomenal actor he was wasn’t enough, he wrote.

I wrote very well. Years and years ago, he had maintained a successful blog where he exercised his acid verve and recounted his adventures as an actor. I invited Pepê to write a chronicle for the book “25 chroniclers speak of overcoming obstacles”, alongside monsters of the genre such as Ruy Castro, Sérgio Rodrigues, Marcelo Moutinho, Cora Rónai, Martha Medeiros. His chronicle, recounting the misadventures of a passport left at a hotel in Paris, was one of the most amusing.

From his last stage work it is worth reproducing one of his scenic chronicles, so to speak. In memory of the 50 years of his career, he had a text remembering his grandmother that ended like this: “I was her favorite grandson. And she was not shy about showing, wherever she was, that she loved me and that I belonged to her in fact and (…) Dona Prazeres lived to be 95 years old, always very happy, like the uneducated peasant woman in the olive groves and vineyards of Serra da Estrela. And I echo his last sentence – I kissed him so little, even though I kissed him a lot.