Dadi Pinero is an American actor and writer of Puerto Rican descent. Brother of the famous poet Miguel Pignero. He is famous for his leading role in the film "Angel and Big Joe" (1975), which won the Oscar for Best Short Film.
Dadi Piñero - b. January 8, 1960 in New York, Puerto Rican actor, famous for his role in the short film "Angel and Big Joe". Writer, member of the "Nuyorican" literary movement of Puerto Rican poets. Brother of the famous poet Miguel Pignero.
Biography
His mother, Adelina Riviera Pignero, originally from Gurabo, Puerto Rico, immigrated to New York in 1946 when her first son, Miguel, was 4 years old.
The family lived in poverty. A few years after the move, Father Miguel Angel Gomez Ramos left the family, as a result of which Adeline Pignero had to live with four children on the streets of Manhattan for seven months until the woman found a job.
Living on the streets of the Lower East Side, a dysfunctional neighborhood in Manhattan, has become a school of survival for children. The eldest son Miguel was forced to steal food in order to feed his mother, brothers and sisters. Dadi was only three years old at that time.
Dadi's childhood passed on the street, surrounded by prostitutes, criminals and drug addicts fighting for survival. When the boy was 13 years old, his mother died. The teenager moved to live with his older brother Miguel.
Brother's influence
When his mother died, Miguel, Dadi's older brother, was not even 16 years old. He was a member of a gangster group and has never been jailed for robbery and drug dealing.
In 1973, Miguel was sentenced to seven years in the Sing Sing High Security Prison for armed robbery. This prison was known for its strict rules, the death penalty in the electric chair, which was practiced until 1963, and the brutality of the inmates.
In Sing Sing, Miguel Pignero, impressed by the inhumanity of the place, wrote his first play for the theater in 1974: Short Eyes: Murder of a Rapist. Short Eyes (English) - prison slang for child molesters. In his work, Piñero world the cruelty and violence of prison life in all its nakedness.
The play received an unexpected success. The work won the Off-Broadway Award for Best American Play in 1974, as well as the Tony Theater Award.
Pignero received a fee of $ 15,000, a huge sum for the day for a street teenager. He was invited to Princeton University and the Pratt Institute to lecture on the realities of prison life. Miguel recalls these days with surprise in one of his interviews: "I had no education, and I worked as a mentor for the best students at the Pratt Institute."
The beginning of a literary career
Dadi Pignero owes the beginning of his career to his brother. Miguel's life suddenly turned towards creativity, he became interested in theater, began to write plays. Dadi went to theater meetings with his brother.
The themes of the works of Miguel and his comrades revolved around life on the streets of disadvantaged areas, the life of pimps and prostitutes, drug addicts, thieves and robbers. This was a life familiar to the brothers not by hearsay.
In the same year, Miguel and Dadi met 15-year-old Puerto Rican Hector Rodriguez, who remained on the street after the death of his parents. Together, the boys formed the Nuyorican group, New York's Puerto Rican poets, which included Miguel, Hector, Dadi, Hector's older brother Luis Rodriguez and Carlos Perez.
This literary society has become very famous. They were called the voice of street realities. The writers described various social problems such as poverty, hunger, lack of money, drugs, and shattered the myth of the United States as a heavenly place.
Dadi Pignero wrote Life Now in 1976, in which he described the future of the streets of New York in a completely pessimistic way. Dadi's literary career did not work out, and the young man became interested in cinema.
Dadi Pignero's acting career
The Pignero brothers had a love for acting and literature in childhood. Mother Adeline Pignero tried herself in the career of a science fiction writer, and her father loved to tell stories and fairy tales to children.
Older brother Miguel has proven himself as a writer, while Dadi has achieved more success as an actor.
Dadi rose to prominence in 1975 with the title role in the 27-minute film Angel and Big Joe, directed by Bert Saltzman. The film won the Academy Award for Best Short Film.
After a successful debut, Dadi Pignero starred in the following films:
- "The First Deadly Sin" (1980) starring Frank Sinatra, where Dadi got the cameo role of a street teenager. It is noteworthy that the famous actor Bruce Willis made his debut in the same film;
- "Fort Apache, Bronx" (1981) - the role of a revolutionary. Miguel Pignero played one of the main characters in this film;
Dadi Pignero also starred in other films in cameo roles: he played a robber suspected of murder, a teenager from unfavorable neighborhoods and other characters from the life of criminal neighborhoods in New York.
The last role in the career of Dadi Pigneoro was the role of Edward in the film "Women Fight" (2000).
Dadi Pignero's life now
After the death of Miguel Pignero in 1988, Dadi received all rights to his brother's works. In 1994 he decided to re-release the film "Short Eyes", based on the play by Miguel Pignero. He left his acting career, starring for the last time 19 years ago in the film Woman Fight (2000).
The actor has a page on the social network Facebook, where he shares family photos, newspaper clippings with articles about the literary and acting successes of the Piñero brothers, communicates with fans and journalists. There you can also find out about how Dadi Pignero lives now.
His brothers Edwin Homer and Floencio Riviera serve in the Puerto Rican army.
Little is known about Dadi Pignero's personal life. The widow actor, his wife Avilda, who was two years older than her husband, died several years ago. The actor left a daughter from the marriage, and in 2018, on January 8, on Dadi's birthday, a granddaughter was born.
