By: EFE
By: EFE
Mario Kreutzberger , the popular Don Francisco who drove for more than 50 years the variety program “Sábado Gigante”, he feels that he has fulfilled his mission to “inform, entertain”, as he said in an interview with Efe as a result of his autobiographical book “With desire to live”, which he will present at the Book Fair of Miami.
“ I feel great satisfaction having fulfilled the mission of a driver, which is to entertain, inform . That is the best payment, to be remembered as a good person. And I have felt from the people that I have met “, confessed the presenter, who in 2015 lowered the curtain on “Sabado Gigante,” the longest-running variety show in television history according to Guinness World Records.
Seven years later, people continue to recognize him just by hearing him speak and stop him on the street thanks to a program that during his 53 years of existence represented “the talent of many people” and that since its inception in white and black knew how to adapt to “new technologies and concepts.”
“ I left at the exact moment, about six years later television had a very high downturn “, deepened the Chilean, close to fulfill 81 years, on the changes in the television industry, which at that time was beginning to lose ground in front of the platforms rms of “streaming”.
Thus ended a television project that, as well as satisfactions, meant “a very great family sacrifice”, especially after the decision to export the program to the United States, where he debuted in 1986 from Miami (Florida) , and that led to a period in which the presenter had to travel each week between Chile and the United States.
As his wife, Teresa Muchnik, made him see with the who is about to complete 60 years of marriage, In more than half a century of broadcasts, he only stopped doing the show once: when his mother, Anna Blumenfeld, passed away.
The end of the long-lived television space did not mean that it will abandon the screens and is that then he made the leap to the Hispanic network Telemundo, and since February of this year he has been presenting on CNN en Español the interview space “Reflections with Don Francisco.”
As previously said , the program on the cable channel was the result of a personal process that was marked by the eight decades it completed last year and in the midst of confinement due to the covid pandemic – 19.
“I had never been in my house as I was, seven months without leaving,” said the Chilean, who took advantage of that moment to begin writing his memoir “With a desire to live”, published by Penguin Random House and that, although He has already written books such as his autobiography “Entre the sword and the tv (2001) ”, this year is the one that allows him to go for the first time as an author to the Miami Book Fair.
Up to about six hours a day of writing and research that discovered him, even with documentary evidence, the entry of his father, Erich Kreutzberger, into the Buchenwald concentration camp after the so-called Night of Broken Glass, which took place in Nazi Germany on November 9, 1938, with systematic attacks against Jews and their businesses.
The seclusion of his father in that concentration camp, one of the most greats of the Nazi regime and in which it is estimated that more than 56 thousand people, it was a revelation for him, who always thought that his father was in Bergen-Belsen.
Once released, Erich Kreutzberger undertook a long flight away or from the Europe of the Second World War until settling in Chile, where shortly after his son Mario would be born.
Little Mario was predestined to follow in his father’s footsteps in clothing textile and their 19 He traveled to New York for years to become a modeling technician, but there he discovered television, “a kind of radio that could be seen and heard.” The device that would be the axis of his life.
Lorenzo Castro E.
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