Mircea Diaconu, one of the most well-known faces of Romanian theater and film of the last 50 years, who pursued a successful career in politics has died, days short of his 75th birthday.
Mr. Diaconu died on Saturday at the Fundeni Institute in Bucharest, where he was being treated for aggressive colon cancer, his wife, the actress Diana Lupescu said. He would have turned 75 on December 24.
Born on Christmas Eve in 1949, in the village of Vlădești southern Romania, he first appeared on stage in 1970, and on screen two years later. In 1982 he became an actor at the Nottara Theater in Bucharest. During communism, actors were employed by a theater and could not pursue a free-lance career.
During his career, he acted in some sixty films through to the 2000s, and continued to act in theater over the next decade.
But his life was also dedicated to politics.
As Romania’s anti-communist revolution unfolded, Diaconu, whose Nottara Theater was close to the unrest, was one of the people who spoke to the crowd from the Communist Party headquarters after Nicolae Ceausescu fled by helicopter. Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed after a summary trial on Christmas Day 1989.
A year after Ceausescu’s demise, Diaconu became a founding member of the Civic Alliance. From 2008 to 2014, he was a member of the National Liberal Party and was elected Senator for his home county of Argeș in the 2008 elections.
He was appointed Culture Minister in 2012, but held the post for a little over one month. In a blot on an otherwise respectable career, he was forced out of office the following month after Romania’s highest court ruled there was a conflict of interest between his ministerial position and his managerial role at the theater. As minister he was responsible for allocating funds to the theater he was manager of.
In 2011, he was the subject of an investigation by prosecutors for having helped hire his wife as a director at Nottara Theater in 2007, even though she was not qualified for the role.
He ran for the European Parliament campaigning as an independent persecuted by bureaucratic institutions determined to keep him out of office. He easily won a seat in the 2014-2019 legislature.
The same year, he ran as an independent candidate in the Romanian presidential elections and finished an honorable fourth with 9% of the vote.
He will be buried in the village of Săftica north of Bucharest at a private funeral. He is survived by his wife, a son, a daughter and a grandchild.
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