The Short Life, Bitter Death of Pixote : Brazilian Film Star’s Life Ends in Slums He Couldn’t Escape

Fernando Ramos da Silva, the angel-faced street urchin catapulted to fame in an acclaimed 1980 movie about abandoned children, was not only a star, but a symbol of hope in Brazil.

“Pixote,” the oppressively sad portrait of a boy swept by the currents of his sordid environment into an ugly urban whirlpool of crime and violence, reflected real-life triumph for the 11-year-old Sao Paulo slum kid who played the title role so convincingly.

Yet, his success was fleeting, he returned to the slums he came from, and last week, at 19, Ramos da Silva’s life ended in police gunfire.

Unanswered Questions

Left behind was a teen-age wife, a daughter, and some unanswered questions: Did his slum environment doom him from the start; did he unconsciously live out the tragic elements of his movie role; or did success, ironically, spoil him?

Near the end of his short acting career, Ramos da Silva pleaded with the author whose book inspired “Pixote” to write a sequel.

“If you write ‘The Return of Pixote’ I will be even better,” he told Jose Louzeiro. Louzeiro, recalling Ramos da Silva’s words in a local magazine article this week, said the boy remained obsessed with being Pixote.

“I tried to pull him out of this absurd dream, to wake him up for other projects, but he didn’t seem to believe,” Louzeiro wrote.

Others who knew Ramos da Silva have said he lacked the minimal cultural and educational background needed for an acting career. Some say he simply was not strongly motivated.

Not Prepared for Acting

“I don’t think he truly wanted to be an actor, a job that requires a lot of dedication and patience,” fellow actress Fernanda Montenegro said.

It was not the kind of world Ramos da Silva was born into.

The sixth of 10 children, he arrived Nov. 29, 1967, in the suburb of Diadema, part of the patchwork of poverty, ramshackle homes, dirt lanes and desperate need that surround South America’s largest city, a prosperous metropolis of skyscrapers, freeways and factories.

The family’s poverty deepened with the death of the father when Ramos da Silva was 8. His mother was left with a pension of less than $10 a month. To survive, she and her children sold lottery tickets on the city streets.

Ramos da Silva attended grade school, but reportedly never learned to read or write very well. He found his way into a theater group, and won a part in a 1977 play, and perhaps that interest in acting helped keep him out of trouble. There is no record of delinquency in his early years.

Through his theater activities, he came to the attention of Hector Babenco, an Argentine-born movie-maker working in Brazil and looking for a Pixote. With his big, expressive eyes and his quietly engaging manner, Ramos da Silva seemed right for the role, and was chosen from more than 1,000 candidates.

The movie was filmed in 1979, when Ramos da Silva was 11. In an introductory scene, he is shown with his real mother in front of their squalid home. Then, when the film story starts, he becomes Pixote, a wide-eyed and apprehensive new inmate in a Sao Paulo reform school who witnesses a gang-rape in the darkened dormitory and learns lessons in gambling, pornography, duplicity and brutality before escaping the institution and taking to the streets of Sao Paulo with prostitutes and cocaine dealers.

He ends up in Rio de Janeiro, working with an alcoholic prostitute to rob her customers at gunpoint. At one point, when a drunken American customer resists, Pixote accidentally shoots his own friend, then kills the American. Bewildered and sickened by what he has done, he is then rejected by the prostitute and is last seen walking along the railroad tracks on the outskirts of Rio, sometimes skipping, sometimes balancing on a rail, as the movie ends.

The film’s effect on audiences was powerful. It won international prizes and played at art-film theaters in the United States and Europe. An estimated 2.5 million people in 20 countries saw it.

Ramos da Silva appeared on Brazilian television screens promoting Christmas card sales for the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF. “If everyone helps, one day there will be Pixotes only in the movies,” he said.

A Scholarship, Modest House

The mayor of Duque de Caxias, a poor suburb of Rio de Janeiro, gave him a scholarship to an acting school and a modest house for his family. He received small parts in stage plays, two movies and a television soap opera.

But he did not get along with the children in his acting classes, and he soon stopped attending. Instead, he began going to neighborhood theaters to watch reruns of “Pixote.”

At the Globo television network, he had trouble reading the soap-opera script and memorizing his lines, despite help from a special teacher. He failed to show up for some filming sessions, and after six months, he was fired. At his urging, his mother sold the donated house in Duque de Caxias, and the family moved back to Diadema where he bought an old car and a small coffee shop with a pool table. But he spent little of his time in the business, and it did not do well.

When director Babenco was filming “The Kiss of the Spider Woman,” Ramos da Silva got a job as an assistant on the set. According to the newsmagazine Veja, he was fired two weeks later after taking two pistols that were being used as film props.

In 1984, when he was 16, he was arrested for armed robbery; the story made front-page headlines. Someone at the scene of the crime recognized him as Pixote. But the publicity apparently saved him from going to reform school.

He married in 1985 and became a father in early 1986. Still, according to police, his criminal activities continued.

‘He Cried a Lot’

“Pixote was a known bandit,” Mauro Miguel Bittar, the police officer who first arrested him, told a Brazilian newspaper the day he died. “Every time he was detained, Pixote promised to straighten out, and he cried a lot. . . . But this time the story has a much different ending.”

According to police reports, Ramos da Silva and a young boy were seen Aug. 25 trying to hold up a pedestrian on a street near Diadema. Three officers chased him, the official report said, and he opened fire on them with a .32-caliber revolver. He was cornered in a tenement house, not far from his childhood home, and killed in a shoot-out, the report added.

Ramos da Silva’s mother and teen-age wife, however, called the shooting a police execution--not an unusual occurence in Brazilian slums. Ramos da Silva’s body had eight bullet wounds, including six in the chest. A forensic report said he was lying on the ground and was shot from above.

A resident of the tenement house told TV Globe, Brazil’s largest television network, that Ramos da Silva pleaded with the policemen, “Don’t kill me. I have a daughter to raise.” She also said he was unarmed.

Wednesday, more than a week after the shooting, the Sao Paulo state police announced that the three officers involved were being dismissed and will face an official inquiry.