The writer honors Maria Montez and Patricia Medina with a conference at the Royal Economic Society of Friends of the Country and recalls that the actresses had island parents
They shone their light in the golden age of cinema in Hollywood. The decades of the 40s and 50s were moments of splendor in the seventh art and, among the names of the actresses who starred in dramas and adventure stories on the big screen, there are two whose origin is in the Canary Islands. They are Patricia Medina and Maria Montez and their relationship with the Archipelago could not be closer, their parents were born in Gran Canaria and on the island of La Palma, respectively.
Professor and writer Pedro Nolasco Leal offered a conference yesterday about both actresses in the auditorium of the Royal Economic Society of La Laguna. The reason, he indicated, is that next July will celebrate the centenary of the birth of Patricia Medina. We must take into account the important career of this actress, who died in 2012 when she was already 92 years old. She participated in fifty tapes and worked under the orders of directors such as Orson Wells, Robert Aldrich, and Jean Nebulesco. In addition, she acted alongside stars such as Gene Kelly, Lana Turner, James Steward, Glenn Ford, and Deborah Kerr.
Medina was born in Liverpool but her father, Ramón Medina Nebot, was from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. He studied law in Seville and soon after began working at the Yeoward Line fruit company and was posted to Liverpool, where he met his wife and had three daughters. The second of these was Patricia, who began her film career in England before leaving for the United States with her husband Richard Greene, also an actor. The marriage failed and shortly after they divorced, it was in 1951. In 1960, the actress remade her life with another actor, Joseph Cotten, with whom she also shot the odd tape. Cotten would go down in history for his role in the mythical Citizen Kane, by Orson Wells. Meanwhile, her physical appearance as a Latina and dark-haired woman led Medida to star in many adventure films, including Black Flag (1952), The Ship of the Damned (1953), and Mr. Arkadin (1955).
Meanwhile, María Montez was born in Barahona, in the Dominican Republic. Her father, Isidoro Gracia from La Palma, arrived there after trying his luck as an emigrant in Cuba. Some data suggest that the actress was educated in a Catholic center in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. In the mid-1930s, her father was appointed Spanish consul in Belfast and it is there that Maria meets her first husband, William McFeeters. Like Medina, Montez also separated from her first husband and she decided to move to New York, where she took her first steps as a magazine model. There she met Joe Pastemark, an important director of Universal, and she began her brilliant film career with this company. "With the Second World War, a type of cinema known as escapism became popular, tapes that were often broadcast to encourage the troops and that was often Arabic-themed," Nolasco explained. From that time are probably her most famous films: The Thousand and One Night, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and Queen Cobra. Other very famous ones were Alma Zíngara and Sudan.
In 1943, Montez meets her second husband, a very famous French actor named Jean-Pierre Aumont. When the war ends, the couple has their daughter, also an actress Tina Aumont. Her last film in Hollywood, before finally moving to France, was Atlantis. After several projects that include music and poetry, María Montez died in her bathtub at just 39 years old when she was planning her return to the mecca of American cinema.
Contemporaries with a successful career never managed to share a project but they have in common -besides her Canarian heritage- the fact that they have achieved fame with a filmography that has gone down in history. Even though her origin is quite unknown in the Islands, they are a reference in the history of cinema, and Montez, for example, has several streets and gives its name to the airport of her hometown, Barahona.
