Angela McEwan, who was born in Santa Monica in 1934, had dreamed of becoming an actress when she was just a child, had studied at Los Angeles City College and at UCLA. But she fell in love and married Guillermo McEwan, a UCLA medical student from Nicaragua. After they married, the couple moved to Mexico where Angela McEwan began to act, continued to perform in local theater productions when the married couple moved to Temple, Texas. Upon returning to Southern California, Angela earned a master's in Spanish at UC Irving, where she also taught before becoming a criminal court Spanish interpreter for 30 years. When her husband Guillermo retired in 2005 Angela began taking acting lessons and did some episodic television work on "The New Girl,"
Parks and Recreation (2009) and other television series. "She came late in life to acting," Alexander Payne said in an interview with The L.A.Times in 2014. "I cast her off a tape. My casting director John Jackson and I were in Omaha and hadn't pulled the trigger on that part. We knew we wanted someone quite special. We kept returning to her tape." Payne, though, doesn't like to cast someone without meeting them. "I happened to be coming out to Los Angeles and I called her. I met her at her sister-in-law's home in Hancock Park. We had coffee together in the late afternoon. She baked me cookies. It just came from the heart." Payne and Jackson had been seeking lesser-known actors and even retired farmers from "Nebraska," but their biggest discovery might have been Angela. "I don't know who she is but look how sweet she is," Payne recalled Jackson saying after seeing McEwan's tape. McEwan, who had a recurring role on HBO's "Getting On," continued to work after she was diagnosed with cancer in October 2014. She also had a role in the indie film "The Boonville Redemption," with Pat Boone and Diane Ladd. A writer, McEwan's poetry has been published in such literary magazines as "Revisit Chicano Requena" and "Apostrophe." Angela McEwan died on Sunday December 20, 1915 from complications of lung cancer at the age of 81. "My mom had an amazing capacity to see good in everyone," said her son Carlos McEwan. "She believed that everyone tries to do their best within their abilities, so there is no reason to be negative." In addition to her son Carlos, she is survived by her other son, William and three grandchildren.
