father hadn’t much taken an interest in the actress until now. Her career spanned decades—she had been in films since she was a child, yet my father hadn’t gone out of his way to watch her films, nor her live performances on stage, and hear her music. I think he found her different, not your usual, factory-produced star. He liked her looks. She was certainly photogenic. But her Hispanic-Filipino face was more interestingly expressive, less common, than the half-Western actress-models that currently proliferate Philippine cinema and television. She spoke Tagalog and English with a Spanish inflection, rather than the ubiquitous American twang. I looked at clips of her on Youtube. She gives the impression of being robust, passionate, and yet, somehow deeply wounded. “Everything I do is 100 percent,” she said. The untimely death of one so driven, and so much in life’s grip, is indeed a dreadful waste.