Puerto Rico’s voice of salsa, lost but found. Marc Anthony as Hector Lavoe in the movie “El Cantante” (”The Singer”)

“Among the many films competing for attention at next month’s Toronto International Film Festival will be one whose subject, the charismatic salsa singer Hector Lavoe, all but demanded big screen treatment.

Considered by many to represent the very soul of the Puerto Rican people - his nickname was “La Voz” (”The Voice”) - Lavoe teetered between high drama and full-blown tragedy. He was renowned for his intuitive connection to the audience. Yet he was also a drug addict whose final years were beset by his mother-in-law’s murder and the accidental shooting death of a son, the destruction of his house in a fire and his own suicide attempt. Lavoe died in 1993, at 46, from cardiac arrest, possibly from complications of AIDS.”

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