by Antonio Mejías-Rentas
Ricardo Montalvan y Tatoo (Hervé Villechaize, izq.)
LEGENDARY STAR: Actor Ricardo Montalbán, one of Hollywood’s first Hispanic leading men and a pioneering activist for Latino inclusion in the entertainment industry, died last week at his Los Angeles home. He was 88.The Mexico-born son of Spanish immigrants, Montalbán died of natural causes. The actor had been ailing and wheelchair-bound for several years, following surgery to alleviate the effects of an injury early in his career. He died from complications of advancing age.
Under contract with MGM in the 1940s, Montalbán starred in numerous Hollywood films, playing mostly ethnic, albeit dignified, roles. He is best remembered, nevertheless, for famously nonethnic characters: Mr. Roarke, the mysterious white-suited protagonist in the long-running ABC series Fantasy Island and the evil antagonist in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan.
His career spanned nearly seven decades and he continued working in cartoon voiceovers through last year. His last films were Spy Kids 2 and Spy Kids 3, for which he was cast as the grandfather by filmmaker and admirer Robert UURodríguez.
Hollywood’s Latino community recognizes Montalbán as the founder, in 1970, of the actors’ organization Nosotros. The group advocated for accurate portrayals of Hispanics in entertainment and handed out Golden Eagle awards, a precursor to the National Council of La Raza’s Alma Awards.Though he migrated as a youth and went to high school in Los Angeles, Montalbán began his acting career in New York theater before returning to Mexico City, where he played leading roles from 1941 to 1945. A year later he was under contract to one of Hollywood’s biggest studios.
In 1944, he married actress Georgiana Young. One of Hollywood’s most devoted couples, they raised four children. She died in 2007. Montalbán suffered a spinal injury in a horse fall while making a 1951 Western, and thereafter walked with a limp he managed to mask during performances. He famously refused to become a U.S. citizen until 2003, when Mexico authorized the dual citizenship.
Pedro Aguilar y Tito Puentes (der)
In related news:
- Pedro Aguilar, a famous mambo dancer in the 1950s who adopted the nick name “Cuban Pete” from a Desi Arnaz song, has died in Miamiat age 81. Born in Puerto Rico, Aguilar was a known fi gure at New York’s Palladium dance hall where the top mambo musicians played. Later he helped choreograph the 1992 fi lm The Mambo Kings and Mambo No. 2 a.m. for Miami City Ballet.
- Argentinean singer Enrique Dumas, one of the first to perform tango on his country’s television in 1950, died Jan 18 of a heart attack. He was 73. He began as a jazz singer at age 14 but made his radio debut at 20 performing with a tango orchestra. In 1958 he was among the fi rst to perform the tango on television. He later acted in film and television and tour internationally as a singer.
- Tommy Muñiz, a pioneering Puerto Rican TV producer, died last week in San Juan from a neurological ailment. He was 86. He was also an actor, screenwriter and broadcaster, owner of both radio and TV stations in Puerto Rico. In 1980 he starred in Lo que le pasó a Santiago, the only Puerto Rican film ever nominated for an Oscar. Hispanic Link.
