Ana Lupez

Ana Lupez was born on 28 March 1944 in Guaymallén, in Argentina's Mendoza Province. She was assigned male at birth and later said she felt distress from about the age of seven, when she was forced to wear boys' clothes. At first an only child, she gained seven younger half-siblings when her mother remarried. Her early femininity was regarded as an illness under the medical and moral standards of the time, and other children mockingly called her María Félix.

At 14 she left home and lived in poverty, working in a circus and performing at harvest festivals. A year later she moved to Buenos Aires and began working in cabaret, where she was arrested repeatedly under laws used against gay and trans people.

In 1964 Lupez moved to Montevideo, where she appeared on the comedy programme Telecataplúm and, through Brazilian trans performers, began working in transformismo. She studied ballet and Argentine folklore and, returning to Buenos Aires in the late 1960s, spent around ten years in the revue theatre circuit at houses such as the Teatro Maipo and Teatro El Nacional, sharing bills with Moria Casán, Zulma Faiad, Nélida Lobato, Carmen Barbieri and Pepe Marrone. In the late 1970s she adopted the name Ana Lupez and toured Peru, Venezuela, Chile, Bolivia and Brazil.

In 1979, fleeing the repression of the military dictatorship, she left Argentina and, after short stays in Brazil and Portugal, settled in Spain, where the transition to democracy allowed more freedom. She debuted at the Gay Club in Madrid. In 1981 the showman Pierrot hired her for Barcelona de Noche, the cabaret known as the Gay Cathedral, where she starred in Locas de amorrr and became its supervedette. She also appeared in E.L.L.A.S in 1983, Escándalo Gay in Madrid in 1984, and led the show at New Centaurus in Madrid between 1984 and 1986. In 1987, with two Argentine colleagues, she bought Barcelona de Noche and staged Las tretas de Ana and Un desplume diferente. The club closed on 16 September 1990, when the El Raval district was redeveloped before the 1992 Olympics.

In the 1990s she moved to the Canary Islands, where she ran the Paradise nightclub in Maspalomas and owned two restaurants and a custom shoe shop. In 1990 she appeared in Eva y Adán, agencia matrimonial and in Bigas Luna's film Las edades de Lulú. After returning to Argentina in the 2000s she staged Otro tipo de mujer on Avenida Corrientes, and in 2019 she received a lifetime achievement award at Miss Transformarte in Alicante.

Lupez underwent gender-affirming surgery in Barcelona in 1986, one of the first Argentine trans women to do so, and described it as the greatest triumph of her life. Asked whether being a woman had been her success, she said her great success had been being a fighter and being at peace with herself, adding that she was an artist and had not become trans in order to be one. She had a long relationship with an Italian partner until his death in 2003. In retirement she lived for a time in Benidorm, Spain; she died in her native Mendoza. Her life story was told in the book Quién me quita lo bailado by activist Barbi di Rocco.

Ana Lupez died in the early hours of Wednesday 14 October 2026 at the Santa María clinic in Mendoza, aged 82. She had been admitted urgently after a relapse in her health, according to members of the LGBTIQ+ community who confirmed the death; no specific cause was made public. The Argentine Actors Association published a farewell on 15 October describing her as a trans pioneer of Argentine entertainment. In keeping with her wishes there was no wake. Her remains were to be cremated and her ashes scattered on the boards of the Teatro Quintanilla in Mendoza, the first stage on which she performed.

Lupez is remembered as a pioneer of trans visibility in Argentine and Spanish entertainment and as the woman who led Barcelona de Noche through its final decade. The Argentine Actors Association said her career, built in Argentina and abroad in the face of discrimination and persecution, opened the way for later generations of trans artists. Coverage of her death described her as the oldest trans woman in Argentina and as a symbol of resistance for a community that had faced police persecution for decades.