Cuna de lobos (English: Den of Wolves) is a Mexican thriller telenovela created by Carlos Olmos and produced by Carlos Téllez for Televisa. It was originally broadcast by Canal de las Estrellas (now known simply as Las Estrellas) between 1986 and 1987. It focuses on the struggle for power within a wealthy Mexican pharmaceutical dynasty. Departing from the conventions of contemporary telenovelas, Cuna de lobos features elements of irony and murder, and it was the first Mexican telenovela broadcast in a primetime evening slot.
The series stars Gonzalo Vega as José Carlos, Diana Bracho as Leonora, Alejandro Camacho as Alejandro, Rebecca Jones as Vilma, and María Rubio as the matriarch Catalina Creel. Cuna de lobos was a ratings success in its native Mexico and Rubio's performance received particular attention. Such was her character's popularity that signs read Catalina Creel for President the day after the finale. The show was also broadcast in other countries such as Germany and Brazil and inspired a loose adaptation in Spain.
A pilot was filmed in 2010 for a new show titled Por derecho de sangre, but it never went to series. A remake titled Cuna de lobos premiered on Televisa in 2019.
Synopsis The show opens on Carlos Larios (Raúl Meraz) and the one-eyed Catalina Larios Creel (María Rubio), owners of the powerful Lar-Creel pharmaceutical company. Carlos accuses Catalina of lying to him. He says he is going to change his will and divorce her. Catalina picks up a vial of poison and declares to the camera: "No me dejas otra alternativa, Carlos. Es tu... o yo." (You leave me no other choice, Carlos. It's you... or me.) Carlos then dies in a suspicious car accident after having a heart attack.
Her plan backfires when she learns that his will bequeathed the company to the firstborn son of either of his children: Alejandro (Alejandro Camacho), Catalina's favorite, or José Carlos (Gonzalo Vega), her stepson. Alejandro's wife, Vilma (Rebecca Jones) infertile. He tells her they will secretly adopt a child and persuades her to feign a pregnancy of her own. Alejandro begins a secret romance with the working-class Leonora Navarro (Diana Bracho), who was present at Carlos's death. He brings her to the Larios family penthouse, claiming that his mother would not approve of their love. Leonora marries Alejandro in a fake wedding ceremony. Her godmother Doña Esperanza (Carmen Montejo) comes to live with her in the penthouse. Doña Esperanza suspects deception but has a stroke at the moment she might have exposed it.
The audience learns that Catalina's eyepatch conceals a perfectly healthy eye. She has spent decades falsely claiming that José Carlos blinded her with a spinning top, a lie that poisoned his standing in the family. She wears a blonde wig when conducting clandestine business. When Catalina discovers Alejandro's scheme, she judges him too reckless to be trusted. She stabs Vilma with a fire poker to reveal that the pregnancy is merely a pillow under Vilma's dress. When the heir is born, Alejandro takes the child from Leonora to present as Vilma's son. Catalina orders Leonora killed; Leonora escapes but is confined to a psychiatric institution.
A year later, Leonora seduces José Carlos to gain entry to the Larios mansion and seek revenge on Catalina. She finds herself genuinely falling in love and marries him. Leonora and Catalina wage a quiet war of attrition inside the mansion with neither able to move openly against the other. Leonora forms an alliance with Bertha (Rosa María Bianchi), Catalina's personal secretary, who has inside knowledge of Catalina's crimes and has lived in terror of her employer. The family starts to fracture when José Carlos learns that the child, little Edgar, is Leonora's biological son. Leonora arrives at Catalina's birthday costume party dressed in the blonde wig and trench coat from the latter's double life. The resulting confrontation leads Alejandro to learn that Catalina murdered his father. He sends little Edgar to his in-laws and distances himself from his mother.
Catalina tracks down Bertha, who has gone into hiding and runs a travel agency. She strangles Bertha's associate and runs Bertha off the road in a car crash. The accident inadvertently brings her to a clinic where a doctor reveals to José Carlos that his mother has perfect vision in both eyes. José Carlos confronts her alone at dinner, naming her as his father's murderer. The secret of the eye patch is spoken aloud between them.
With her family turning on her, Catalina makes one final move. She tampers with the fuel tank of the family plane, intending to kill José Carlos. Alejandro and Vilma are instead killed in the explosion. On receiving the news, Catalina dresses in her blonde wig, removes her eyepatch, and drinks the same poison she used to murder her husband. The series ends with an epilogue five years later: Leonora and José Carlos's young son finds Catalina's eyepatch in the room where she died. He places it over his own eye, and says, "Yo no soy Braulio, soy el pequeño Edgar." (I'm not Braulio, I'm little Edgar.)
Cast Main
Gonzalo Vega as José Carlos Diana Bracho as Leonora Alejandro Camacho as Alejandro Rebecca Jones as Vilma María Rubio as Catalina
Recurring and guest stars
Carmen Montejo as Esperanza Lilia Aragón as Rosalía Carlos Cámara as Gutiérrez Edna Bolkán as Paulina Humberto Elizondo as Suárez Rosa María Bianchi as Bertha Josefina Echánove as Elvia Ana Bertha Espín as Mayra Miguel Gómez Checa as Terán Blanca Torres as Cleotilde Enrique Muñoz as Curiel Luis Rivera as Mauricio Lourdes Canale as Carmelita Julia Alfonzo as Lutecia Raúl Meraz as Carlos
Awards Year Award Category Nominee(s) Result1987 TVyNovelas Awards Best Telenovela Carlos Téllez Best Actress Rebecca Jones Best Antagonist Actress María Rubio Best Antagonist Actor Alejandro Camacho Best Experienced Actress María Rubio Best Original Story or Adaptation Carlos Olmos Best Direction Carlos Téllez
Production Cuna de lobos was created by Carlos Olmos and directed and produced by Carlos Téllez. The pair met in the 1970s and collaborated on La pasión de Isabela in 1984. They developed a reputation for challenging genre formulas and completing scripts in advance to give their projects a cohesive vision. The character of Catalina Creel was inspired by Bette Davis, a U.S. film star. In The Anniversary, Davis played Mrs. Taggart, a manipulative widow with an eye patch; the final scene of Cuna de lobos is an homage to her character.
Televisa executives found Olmos and Téllez's idea for a thriller telenovela strange. Cuna broke with the romantic conventions of other telenovelas, and the project lacked a bankable star. Olmos asked Gonzalo Valdés Medellín who should play his villain. The latter was a fan of María Rubio from her performance on Rina in 1977. She accepted, believing that she was at the right age yet still had adequate energy to play the matriarch. Luis Reyes de la Maza, a playwright who had penned a series of successful scripts for Televisa and served as an executive, played a role in greenlighting the project. He was Rubio's husband at the time. Téllez cast a mixture of known stage actors like Alejandro Camacho and "new talent" like Rubio, Diana Bracho, and Rebecca Jones rather than rely on Televisa's roster of established names.Wright (2023), pp. 181-4.
At Téllez's direction, costume designers evoked Joan Crawford's style from the 1940s and gave Catalina Creel shoulder pads to make her presence larger. Her high fashion with eye patches that matched her outfits became a signature element of the show.Meléndez Escalante (2015), p. 188. In a 2007 Televisa retrospective titled 50 Años de la telenovela (Fifty Years of the Telenovela), Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda, one of the show's writers, said he had not seen The Anniversary. He credited Olmos for Creel's sense of dark humor with her wardrobe. Alejandro Camacho attributed "a large dose of black humor" to the show's success and believed it changed the telenovela genre.
The role of Leonora was first offered to Angélica Aragón. She found the plot too similar to Vivir un poco, her previous project. "Imagine, I was looking for my children for a year, and now I had to look for others. I wanted to change a little." Diana Bracho was initially cast as the villainous Vilma. When Aragón declined to participate, production was delayed for two weeks before Bracho took on the role of Leonora and Rebecca Jones was cast as Vilma.
The cast recalled a chaotic production schedule. The number of episodes was increased as the show grew in popularity, but the actors were at first unaware of the show's reception as they continued filming. At one point Bracho, who was pregnant in real life while portraying her character as such on the show, faced an extrauterine pregnancy with internal bleeding. She was taken to the hospital and told that she could die within three hours. She had to remain in hospital for two to three weeks.
Broadcast history The show was broadcast as 170 half-hour installments between 1986 and 1987. This was shorter than the 200+ episodes of many contemporary telenovelas. Broadcasting at 9pm, it became the first telenovela shown in primetime and was noted for attracting both male and female viewers; up to that point, telenovelas were broadcast earlier in the day and watched by women.Smith (2021), p. 113. The first episode features Catalina Creel killing her husband in cold blood, also a first for Mexican television.
Cuna de lobos was later broadcast in the United States and debuted on the German broadcaster RTL on August 21, 1991. The German broadcast was shown as 85 episodes of 45 minutes each. It became an important cultural export, broadcast in some 185 countries by 2015.Meléndez Escalante (2015), p. 182. The Guardian listed it among influential telenovelas leading to a 2006 effort by the BBC to enter the format.
The show was retitled Ambição (Ambition) for broadcast on the Brazilian television network SBT. It ran from late 1991 to 1992, with a rebroadcast from 1992 to 1993. In the early 2000s, executives wanted to produce a local version of the show. They were unable to secure the rights because a remake would compete with rebroadcasts of the original.
The Spanish series La verdad de Laura was loosely based on Cuna de lobos. It was produced in 2002 by TVE and the production company Europroducciones with the collaboration of Televisa. This version stars Mónica Estarreado and Mariano Alameda. It attempted to bring the telenovela format, which had been looked down upon, to Spain. Variety observed that despite telenovelas' success on Spain's main over-the-air broadcaster, they "continue to fare poorly" on more upscale pay television channels. Starting as a replacement for El secreto, another telenovela by the same producer, La verdad de Laura increased its ratings share from 19.5% in its January premiere to 34.5% in July of that year. The finale was watched by 3.9 million people, corresponding to a 37.0% share.
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