I first encountered Rebekah Del Rio as thousands and thousands of others did — on the motion pictures. I used to be away from Los Angeles, visiting my mother and father in Indiana, when a pal and I went to see director David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” at Motion pictures 6, a second-run home in close by Mishawaka, the place tickets price a buck. Apart from loving “The Straight Story,” I hadn’t been a David Lynch aficionado in any respect, having seen “The Misplaced Freeway” in movie college and stupidly dismissing it as an over-symbolic kooky piece of hoohah. (Boy was I flawed.)
I sat in that creaky seat, watching a dim projection on a tattered display, and was immediately transported to a different world — or ought to I say, again residence to L.A. Past Naomi Watts and Laura Harring’s great wig-swapping weirdness, what actually pulled me in was the scene the place their two characters attend a late evening efficiency in a Los Angeles theater (aptly named “Membership Silencio”). The membership’s announcer introduces “Rebekah Del Rio” and a pale lady with a jeweled tear beneath her eye walks slowly and sadly to the theater’s lone microphone. In opposition to blood-red velvet curtains, and with none musical accompaniment, she belts out Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in Spanish (“Llorando”).
Like Watts’s and Harring’s characters, I used to be fully and totally mesmerized. Del Rio’s efficiency, each intimate and grand on the similar time, was a second that captured the reality of Los Angeles like I’d by no means seen earlier than — the expertise of going out within the wee hours and discovering profound magnificence in unusual corners that may transfer you to tears. The melancholy and melodrama of that straightforward scene, blended with Del Rio’s mournful singing of Orbison’s outdated pop tune, nonetheless strikes and evokes to at the present time.
A few years later, my spouse got here residence from work and stated she had a brand new assistant who’d supposedly starred and sang in “Mulholland Drive.” Did I do know of her? I almost flipped out. I requested, “It couldn’t be Rebekah Del Rio, who had carried out maybe the best scene in movie within the final twenty years, might it?” My spouse didn’t fairly perceive my enthusiasm, however confirmed that was her. Like so many in Hollywood, Rebekah had a day job. Fame and artwork don’t pay all of the payments.
Rebekah was a form, ebullient soul if ever there was, blessed with, as Lynch himself stated, “probably the most lovely voices on the planet.” I later discovered she’d suffered actual hardship in her life, together with the unbelievable tragedy of shedding her solely son. She was nonetheless singing as lately as June 13 at a charity occasion in Los Angeles and had toured with filmmaker Richard Kelly for screenings of the movie “Southland Tales,” by which she’d additionally been featured. I want we had extra from her. “Mulholland Drive” is now rightly acknowledged as one the best — if not the best — movies of the twenty first century and Rebekah’s efficiency is the beating, crying coronary heart of it. Her voice haunts not solely the remainder of the movie however the remainder of American cinema ever since. Llorando.