Book Review: The Diary of Lilian Velez, Chronicle of a Star and a New Nation, 1944-1948.
Archivo 1984 and Arc Lico International Services, Pasay City and Quezon City, 2022
Cover photo of the book, The Diary of Lilian Velez, from a publicity photo of LVN Pictures’ Enkantado (1948) showing Lilian Velez with her new leading man, Jaime De la Rosa.
Few are the diaries of individuals that record the thoughts, impressions and reflections of Filipinos on Philippine history, a highly personal, and painstaking labor so essential for rounding out and giving color and perspective to important periods in the life of our nation. Hence, it is surprising that such an articulate mirror of events should come from the pen of an emerging actress of the immediate postwar period, Ms. Lilian Velez.
Today, she is little known and remembered; her brilliance as a comet on the silver screen was tragically snuffed out at age 24 by her fellow actor and co-star Narding Anzures in 1948.
Her name and memory might have gone forever into oblivion had not her daughter, Vivian Climaco Ocampo, supported by the co-publishers, Archivo 1984 and Arc Lico International, and the able team of Isidra Reyes, Renz Spangler, John Brian de Asis and Gerard Lico, persisted in putting into publication her personal diary of the years 1946 and 1948. Vivian did not even see the product of her efforts as she herself passed away in 2021.