MANILA, Philippines — Dolly de Leon looked back at her roots as a thespian before she became the Philippines’ first British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) and Golden Globe nominee for the international film, “Triangle of Sadness.”
In a talk last Wednesday in Samsung Performing Arts Theater, Circuit Makati for their upcoming play “Request sa Radyo,” Dolly, and her alternate in the play, Lea Salonga, recalled their genesis as artists.
Based on her Golden Globes bio, Dolly classically trained in theater with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Theater Arts from the University of the Philippines.
“It did not hit me until I was in college,” she told Lea and good friend, Tony Award winner and “Request sa Radyo” co-producer Clint Ramos, at the talk.
“I started in school for as long as I was in college… and for me and when I was a kid, but it was just fun and games, it was a lot of fun for me to do that. But I didn’t know that I could make a career out of it. So I was just doing it for fun until I ended up in college,” she shared.
She recalled how much she yearned to be a frontliner in a play, but was assigned to be a backstage staff instead.
“The first play that I ever watched when I was in UP was ‘Isang Dulang Panaginip’ by Rene Villanueva. I was a costume mistress and all my batchmates were performing onstage and I was crying at the back because I was like, ‘I wanna do that! Why am I here?’,” she pondered.
That was the time she realized that she wants to become an actor.
“It was when I was in UP already when I knew that’s really what I wanted to do. I’ll never forget my very first play. It was with Tony Mabesa. It was… written by Floy Quintos, sumalangit nawa ang kaluluwa nilang pareho, both of them.”
Her career, she said, started with just three words.
“And I had one line and to this day I still remember that one line because it was just so incredible for me to be acting for the first time in a student production. And then the line had just three words. It was, ‘Tigang ka talaga!’”
Although the line only had three words, Dolly’s performance was a hit.
“Pero bumenta! As in, people were laughing at that line! And I was like, ‘Ang sarap ng feeling that people are reacting to you in real time!’ Ang sarap ng ganu’n. So I said, ‘This is really what I want to do’.”
De Leon, since then, has starred in more than 30 stage productions ranging from Shakespeare, Harold Pinter to Samuel Beckett, receiving many accolades for her performances in the Philippines and abroad, according to her Golden Globes bio.
In “Request sa Radyo,” Lea and De Leon will perform the solo piece in scheduled alternating performances from October 10 to 20 in Samsung Performing Arts Theater in Makati City.
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