Biography
Armando Manzanero (Armando Manzanero Canché, 1935 – 2020) was a Mexican singer, composer, actor and music producer, considered the leading Mexican composer of romantic music of the post-war era.
He was born in Ticul, Yucatán on December 7, 1935, into a musical family; his father was a singer and composer and his mother played a type of Mexican guitar (jarana jarocha). At the age of eight he began studies at the conservatory of his home town and later continued at the school of fine arts in Mexico City.
In 1950, at the age of fifteen, he composed his first melody entitled Nunca en el Mundo (Never in the World), which met with great success and many arrangements, the following year he began his professional career as a pianist. In 1959 he recorded his first album of love songs and in 1965 he won first place at the Miami Song Festival with the song Cuando Estoy Contigo (When I'm With You).
Manzanero composed more than four hundred songs, fifty of which have given him international fame. He participated in many radio and television shows, recorded more than thirty albums and composed the musical scores of several films. During his fifty-year musical career, he performed throughout Latin America. In 1993 Billboard magazine gave him an award for his outstanding musical career. In 2014 he was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement in the United States.
In 2011 he became President of the National Union of Writers and Composers of Mexico, in which he had previously served as vice president since 1982 and had made great progress in defending artists' copyright.
On December 17, 2020, Manzanero was hospitalized in Mexico City with COVID-19. He died eleven days later from the virus, on December 28, 2020.