María Onetto

María Onetto (18 August 1966 – 2 March 2023) was an Argentine theatre, film, and television actress. She received the a 2011 Konex Award in entertainment for her theatrical work, and is also well known for her role in the 2006 Argentine TV series Montecristo, for which she won the Clarín and Martín Fierro Awards as best actress in drama and rising star. She also directed a localized production of rock musical Passing Strange in 2011.

Onetto was born in Buenos Aires on 18 August 1966. She was the daughter of Estela Mary Pastore and Jorge Onetto, an employee of the energy company Segba (Servicios Eléctricos del Gran Buenos Aires) and restaurateur who died of a sudden myocardial infarction in 1967 when María was one year old. The family lived in the suburb of Martínez, Buenos Aires. She was enrolled in a Catholic school, and at age 17 she began studying psychology at the University of Buenos Aires, where she took up acting in the theater. She graduated in four years and for a time worked in the same school as her mother, preparing psycho-pedagogical reports. In 1991 she entered Sportivo Teatral, Ricardo Bartís's theater workshop, which she greatly enjoyed. After taking classes there, she taught other actors. She left in 1996, planning to study literature, and moved to Benavídez, Argentina, but found she did want to be an actress, which she began with Rafael Spregelburd's production Dragging the Cross, after which she ceased other work to focus solely on acting.Onetto starred in Lucrecia Martel's 2008 film The Headless Woman, playing Veroníca, a middle-aged woman who becomes haunted by guilt and disconnected from her normal life after a hit and run with an unidentified object.Onetto featured in a 2021 production of Eduardo "Tato" Pavlovsky's 1987 play Potestad (lit. Power) directed by Norman Briski, which takes inspiration from Noh theater and in which Onetto plays a male girl's kidnapper during Argentina's last dictatorship.Maria Onetto was found dead in her apartment in Buenos Aires on 2 March 2023, at the age of 56. Information released by the Buenos Aires City Police confirmed that she had committed suicide.