Rene Moreno Movies, TV Shows, and Filmography
Rene Moreno
Acting
Biography
Rene was born in Dallas on May 25, 1959 to Finees Moreno and Myriam Garza Moreno. He attended Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, and studied theater, dance and music at Southern Methodist University. He was gifted as an actor, director and musician. In the 1980s he moved to New York, working in regional theater, and on and off-Broadway. He was a member of SDC (Stage Directors and Choreographers Society) and an Artistic Associate with Shakespeare Dallas, as well as an Affiliated Artist with the Oklahoma City Repertory Theatre. Rene staged plays at all of DFW's major professional theaters and at most of its smaller ones, directing for WaterTower Theatre, Stage West, Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, Theatre Three, Dallas Theater Center, Shakespeare Dallas, WingSpan, and many others. He won many Dallas-Fort Worth Theater Critics Forum awards. He was frequently honored with Best Director awards and taught classes and taught workshops at many colleges, universities and high schools. In 1991, while performing in Federico García Lorca's Yerma at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., he fell five floors out of a hotel window and was paralyzed from the waist down. He returned to Dallas for rehabilitation, and received his MFA in directing from Southern Methodist University in 2001. Moreno had surgery on March 20, 2017, and moved to rehab over the weekend, suffering from heart trouble, followed by kidney and liver failure. He died from heart failure at the Baylor Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, at the age of 57.
Filmography Movies
Acting
Up Syndrome
University of Texas student Duane Graves chronicles his charismatic childhood chum Rene Moreno, a San Antonio native with Down Syndrome, in this playful, stirring, remarkably unique portrait documentary.
Late Bloomers
A lonely secretary leaves her family for love with a female basketball coach. But their awakening galvanizes the local conservative community, with the small-town drama permeating everywhere from the teacher’s lounge to the student body to the PTA, yet leads to unexpected love-conquers-all resolutions.
Detention
After some personal trauma, Wilson Walmsley is invited to work as a substitute teacher in a suburban public high school. He finds lack of authority and interest in the school direction and teacher body; uncontrolled and abusive students in an environment of disrespect and lack of discipline. He becomes close to the arts teacher Louise and to the smart and abused student Joey. When he saves Louise from a sexual assault of the student Davey, Louise and him are sued by Davey's family lawyer; then Davey's girlfriend beats Louise. The upset Walmsley lures, drugs and kidnaps Joey and six troublemakers of his class and brings them to his isolate real estate in Alpine, Texas. When the seven students wake up, they are naked and caged in cages with electric fences. When Walmsley arrives, he advises that his class will begin, and any disrespect or lack of discipline will be duly punished, and shots Joey to make clear his intentions. And the class begins.
$pent
This comic drama examines the relationships and addictions of a group of twenty-something friends with very dysfunctional, yet interesting lives.