María Félix Wiki – María Félix Biography

María Félix was born on April 8, 1914 and died on  April 8, 2002. She was a Mexican actress and singer. Along with Pedro Armendáriz and Dolores del Río, she was one of the most successful figures in Latin American cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. Considered one of the most beautiful actresses of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, her strong personality and taste for finesse earned her the title of diva early in her career.[3] She was known as La Doña, a name derived from her character in Doña Bárbara (1943), and María Bonita, thanks to her hymn composed exclusively for her as a wedding gift by Félix’s second husband, Agustín Lara. Her career as an actress consists of 47 films made in Mexico, Spain, France, Italy and Argentina.

Early Life

María de los Ángeles Félix Güereña was born in Álamos, Sonora, Mexico, on April 8, 1914. Her birth was registered as May 4, which was later misinformed as her date of birth.[5] She was the daughter of Bernardo Félix Flores, a soldier and politician of distant Yaqui descent, and Josefina Güereña Rosas, who grew up in the US state of California; both were of Mexican Basque descent. She had fifteen siblings: Josefina, María de la Paz, Pablo, Bernardo, Miguel, María de las Mercedes, Fernando, Victoria Eugenia, Ricardo, Benjamín and Ana María del Sacramento.

She spent her childhood in Alamos. During her childhood she maintained a close relationship with her brother Pablo de ella. Her mother separated the two brothers, thinking they might be involved in an incestuous relationship. For that reason, Pablo was sent to the Military College, in Mexico City.

Later, the Félix family moved to Guadalajara. When Maria was 17 years old, her beauty soon began to attract attention. She was crowned Beauty Queen at the University of Guadalajara. It was at this time that she met Enrique Álvarez Alatorre, a salesman for the cosmetics firm Max Factor. After a brief romance, the couple married in 1931. In 1935, she Félix gave birth to her only son, Enrique, nicknamed Quique. Her marriage to Álvarez failed and the couple divorced in 1937. After her divorce, Félix returned to Guadalajara with her family, where she was the subject of gossip and rumors about her divorced status. Due to this situation, she Félix decided to move to Mexico City with her son.

In Mexico City, she worked as a receptionist in a plastic surgeon’s office and lived in a guest house. One day, the father of her son visited the child and deliberately refused to return him to her mother. Álvarez took the child to Guadalajara. Felix’s son was recovered with the help of Agustín Lara, her second husband. They planned an elaborate ransom that tricked the grandmother into taking the child.

Personal Life

Felix was married four times. His first marriage (1931-1938) was with the cosmetics salesman Enrique Álvarez Alatorre.He was the father of his only child, actor Enrique Álvarez Félix. According to journalist Sergio Almázon, he once found his son wearing a white dress and a necklace. Enraged, she beat him unconscious. Álvarez retaliated by taking her son to Guadalajara. Years later, Félix was able to recover her son with the help of her second husband, Agustín Lara .

Felix’s relationship with her son was distant in his early years because she sent him to schools abroad “to discipline him.” Years later, Enrique returned to Mexico and began a career as a film and television actor. About his son, Félix said: “Enrique is a very gifted man, with admirable common sense. He is my best friend. I have a lot of fun with him. He is not a ‘mama’s boy’ as many believe. He is independent. He has his own career, his public, his poster and he assumes his responsibilities without depending on me.” Enrique’s unexpected death from a heart attack in 1996 greatly affected Félix.

There are conflicting rumors that, between her marriages to Enrique Álvarez and Agustín Lara, Félix had a brief marriage to Raúl Prado, a member of the Trío Calaveras, but no concrete evidence has emerged that the marriage took place. Most rumors agree that Prado and Félix supposedly married in 1943 after meeting on the set of La roca de las almas and separated two months after the wedding. The Mexican writer Enrique Serna interviewed the last survivor of the trio, Miguel Bermego, who told him that he was a witness to the wedding . Prado’s niece, María Escalera, also corroborated the marriage, saying that the marriage ended when Agustín Lara sent Félix a white piano as a gift, and “Raúl threw her out, with the piano. Then they divorced. So, apparently, María Félix was my aunt-in-law [aunt-in-law].” In his book about Félix María Félix: 47 pasos por la cine, Paco Ignacio Taibo I wrote about the marriage as a fact, saying “During the filming of this film, María would meet Raúl Prado, a member of the Los Calaveras trio.

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After a quick courtship, they got married and divorced shortly after. This is one of the best-protected chapters of the star’s life. Maria’s friends continue to say it was crazy.” Prado’s obituary in the Spanish newspaper El País in April 1989 reported that the marriage was a fact, as did some obituaries for Félix, such as the one in the Argentine newspaper La Nación, the latter which only quoted ” a biography” as a source.He was cited by TVyNovelas as one of the “myths” surrounding Félix. It is known that Félix vehemently denied having married Prado. Serna, who also interviewed Félix, said: “In our first meeting I asked her about her marriage to Raúl Prado (something she denied until the end), the member of the Calaveras trio who sang in Jorge Negrete’s films, and she told me that if I was going to continue with those lies, we weren’t going to be able to work on the book.” Serna added: “At one point she told me: ‘Write what you want about me, because they believe anything about me. Say I slept with an octopus.'”

Her second marriage (1945-1947) was with the composer Agustín Lara. Felix was a fan of Lara since his teens. They were formally introduced by a mutual friend, actor Tito Novaro. The couple began a highly publicized relationship, which culminated in marriage in 1945. Lara immortalized Félix in several songs, such as “Humo en los ojos”, “Cuando vuelves” (“When you come back”), “Dos puñales” (“Two puñales”), “Madrid” and especially the famous song “María Bonita”, composed in Acapulco during her honeymoon. “María Bonita” would become one of Lara’s most popular songs. However, the relationship ended in 1947 due to Lara’s jealousy. Felix said that Lara even tried to kill her in a fit of violent jealousy.

After her second divorce, Félix had affairs with some well-known men, such as the Mexican aviation businessman Jorge Pasquel, the Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín, and the Argentine actor Carlos Thompson. Félix met Thompson in Argentina in 1952 during the filming of La pasión desnuda by Luis César Amadori, and the relationship would be serious to the point that they got engaged to be married, and Félix even called her son Enrique Álvarez Félix to meet the potential his stepfather. . However, during filming, Félix received a call from director Emilio Fernández to offer him the lead role in The Rapture, to which Félix accepted and told Thompson that after filming of La pasión desnuda finished he would return to Mexico to promote the film and announce its future. marriage. However, once in Mexico, Félix called off the wedding days before it was to take place, stating that he concluded that the only thing that united her to Thompson was mere physical attraction and not true love.

During her stay in France, Félix was introduced by the painter Leonor Fini to the French writer Jean Cau, assistant to the writer Jean Paul Sartre. Felix had a brief affair with Cau.[30] From the late 1950s until the spring of 1954, Félix also had a passionate homosexual affair with Suzanne Baulé, better known as Frede, who at the time ran Le Carroll’s cabaret on the Rue de Ponthieu in Paris, and the two women lived together in The George V Hotel. The relationship was captured in a painting made by Fini of a plant with two flowers; one had the face of Felix and the other that of Frede. Frede followed Félix on her filming trips to Buenos Aires and São Paulo upon learning of Félix’s relationship with Carlos Thompson. Félix and Frede’s relationship was interrupted by Félix’s marriage to Jorge Negrete, but after Negrete’s death in 1953, Félix returned to Paris to briefly rekindle her relationship with Frede. However, they were violently separated forever in 1954, leading to a trial in which Felix wanted to get back the jewelry he had given Frede and accused her of theft. Felix lost the lawsuit and Frede was acquitted and kept her jewelry. Despite this, Felix owned the painting that Fini made of the two women, and then Felix asked Fini to modify it to erase Frede’s face, changing Frede’s face to hers, resulting in the two flowers in the painting had the face of Felix.

In 1953, when Félix returns to Mexico after her stay in Europe and Argentina, she meets an “old enemy”: the actor and singer Jorge Negrete. Unlike her difficult first meeting ten years ago on the set of El peñon de las ánimas, Félix found Negrete, in her own words: “surrendered at my feet.” After a brief romance, the couple married in 1953, broadcast on the radio to all of Latin America, held at the Casa de Catipoato in Tlalpan. Negrete was already ill when the marriage took place, and he died eleven months later in a hospital in Los Angeles, United States, while Félix was in Europe filming La Belle Otero. Félix’s appearance at his funeral, dressed in trousers, caused a great scandal, which led Félix to take refuge in Europe.[citation needed]

His fourth marriage (1956-1974) was to the Romanian-born French banker Alexander Berger. Felix met Berger in the 1940s, when they were both married. Years later they met again. Felix was married to Berger for 18 years. She tried to become a mother again, but an accident during a filming in 1957 caused Félix to lose the child. It was at this time that he built his famous house, La Casa de las Tortugas (The House of the Turtles), designed by Pepe Mendoza and resembling an Italian villa, in Cuernavaca. Berger died in 1974 of lung cancer months after the death of Felix’s mother, which plunged her into a deep depression. To overcome this depression, she developed a new passion: horses. Some of her horses have won major international equestrian awards. Felix kept his horses for 11 years. [citation needed]

Her last romantic relationship was with the Russian-French painter Antoine Tzapoff. Of him, Felix said: I don’t know if he is the man who has loved me the most, but he is the one who has loved me the best. The press speculated about a strong rivalry between Félix and Dolores del Río, the other female figure in Mexican cinema and a successful Hollywood star. About this “rivalry”, Félix said: “With Dolores I had no rivalry. On the contrary, we were friends and we always treated each other with great respect, each with our own personality. We were completely different. She was refined, interesting, smooth-talking, and I am energetic, arrogant, and bossy.

Death

María Félix died in her sleep on April 8, 2002, her 88th birthday in Mexico City. She was buried in her family mausoleum along with her son Enrique and her parents in the French Pantheon located in Mexico City. In 2018, Google celebrated Felix’s 104th birthday with a Google Doodle. A skeletal version of Felix appears briefly in the 2017 Pixar film Coco, as a guest at a party in the Land of the Dead, with luchador El Santo as her date. On July 21, 2022, the TelevisaUnivision-produced biopic María Félix: La Doña, starring Sandra Echeverría, premiered on the streaming service. Read More…….