Marcela Ortiz

Marcela Ortiz was born in Buenos Aires on 24 June 1965. She began her working life as a catwalk model at the age of 16, appearing in haute couture shows and for companies such as Joseph Coiffure. Her agent, Pepe Parada, introduced her to film and television work.

Ortiz first reached television audiences in 1987 as one of the "chicas Olmedo", the group of young women who appeared with the comedian Alberto Olmedo in No toca boton on ATC. She went on to the comedy programme Basta para mi (1990), hosted by Hugo Sofovich and Alicia Gorbato, where she worked with Enrique Liporace, Jorge Sassi and her close friend Beatriz Salomon, and to La familia Benvenuto and Yo amo a Berugo (1991). In 1994 she played Luly in the Canal 9 telenovela El amor tiene cara de mujer, alongside Thelma Biral, Marita Ballesteros and Laura Novoa.

In cinema she appeared in the 1989 comedies Los extermineitors and Baneros II, la playa loca, both directed by Carlos Galettini, sharing the screen with Guillermo Francella, Emilio Disi and Gino Renni, and in the American film Terrorgram (1990). She also did a theatre season with Olmedo, and in 1991 sat on the jury of the Miss Paraguay contest with the singer Estela Raval.

She moved away from acting at the end of the 1990s, working in wholesale jewellery and as a sales executive for a resort in Buzios, Brazil, and in later years selling products online.

Ortiz married the actor Raul Taibo in 1993 after a courtship of only three months; the wedding was broadcast live on Canal 9. The marriage ended soon afterwards and the divorce, with a legal dispute over property, was one of the most widely covered show business stories in Argentina in the mid 1990s. She later had a daughter, Shelsian, with the businessman Samy Saul, a nephew of the producer Alejandro Romay. She spoke publicly in television and magazine interviews about difficult experiences in her personal life. She was a close friend of the actress Beatriz Salomon, whom she supported until Salomon's death in 2019.

Marcela Ortiz died on Saturday 17 October 2026, aged 61. After going to the cinema and for an ice cream with her friend Samantha Farjat, and stopping at a pharmacy for medication she took for a heart condition, she dropped her friend off and drove on alone. At the corner of Dean Funes and Segui in Villa La Nata, Benavidez, in the Tigre district, her Renault Sandero left the road and fell into a ditch. She was wearing her seat belt but was unconscious, and emergency workers were unable to revive her.

The case was opened as an inquiry into the cause of death by the Benavidez prosecutor's office, which ordered a post mortem to establish whether a cardiac episode caused the crash or whether she died from the impact. Her death became public on 19 October, reported by Clarin, Infobae and La Gaceta, and the Asociacion Argentina de Actores y Actrices published a tribute.

Ortiz is remembered as one of the faces of the picaresque Argentine comedy of the 1980s and 1990s, a period of huge popularity for the genre on television and in cinema. Her work with Olmedo, Francella and the Sofovich comedy programmes kept her in the memory of a generation of viewers long after she had left acting.