3 of the 6 María la del Barrio Leads Are Gone

In February 2026, a character from a Mexican telenovela that finished in 1996 turned up in a Super Bowl commercial in the United States, beside Melissa McCarthy, screaming the same line she screamed at twenty years old. That is where this video starts, and it is the reason the question at the centre of it is worth asking: why will María la del Barrio not die? Six people carried it. Three of them are no longer here. Thalía was 23 when she took the part of María Hernández, closing out the trilogy of Marías after María Mercedes and Marimar. The show was dubbed into Filipino, Russian and Arabic, and the Philippines made an entire local version of it. She married Tommy Mottola in 2000, moved to New York, stopped making telenovelas altogether and turned back to music. She turned 55 in August. Years later she spoke publicly about living with Lyme disease. Fernando Colunga was 29 here, and this is the role that made him the leading man of Televisa. He is 60 as of March, has never used social media, has never discussed his private life, and came back to television in 2022 after six years away. Ricardo Blume, who played Don Fernando de la Vega, was Peruvian - a Lima-born architecture student who left it for the theatre and spent sixty years teaching and directing as well as acting. He died on 30 October 2020, aged 87. Irán Eory, Victoria Montenegro, was born in Tehran in 1939 to an Austrian diplomat and a Sephardic Jewish mother, grew up in Casablanca and Spain, and arrived in Mexico in 1969 for one film and stayed for the rest of her life. She died on 10 March 2002, aged 62, of a degenerative brain illness. Carmen Salinas played Agripina and was two careers at once: a theatre producer who ran the same play for nearly thirty years, and a federal deputy in the Mexican Congress from 2015 to 2018. She died on 9 December 2021, aged 82, after a cerebral haemorrhage. And Itatí Cantoral was twenty when she created Soraya Montenegro. Thirty years on, she is 51, working constantly, and still the only person anyone calls when that character is needed. DISCLAIMER The narration in this video is read by an AI voice. Ages, dates and causes of death were verified against public records in September 2026 and describe the position as of that month.