Lupe Vélez
María Guadalupe "Lupe" Villalobos Vélez was a Mexican actress, singer, and dancer during the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.
Vélez began her career as a performer in Mexican vaudeville in the early 1920s. After moving to the United States, she made her first film appearance in a short in 1927. By the end of the decade, she was acting in full-length silent films and had progressed to leading roles in The Gaucho, Lady of the Pavements and Wolf Song, among others. Vélez made the transition to sound films without difficulty. She was one of the first successful Mexican actresses in Hollywood. During the 1930s, her explosive screen persona was exploited in successful comedic films like Hot Pepper, Strictly Dynamite and Hollywood Party. In the 1940s, Vélez's popularity peaked while appearing as Carmelita Fuentes in eight Mexican Spitfire films, a series created to capitalize on her fiery personality.
Nicknamed The Mexican Spitfire by the media, Vélez had a personal life that was as colorful as her screen persona. She had several highly-publicized romances with Hollywood actors and a stormy marriage with Johnny Weissmuller. Vélez died at age 36 in December 1944 of an intentional overdose of the barbiturate drug Seconal. Her death and the circumstances surrounding it were the subject of speculation and controversy.
Life and career
Childhood and education
Vélez was born in the city of San Luis Potosí in Mexico, the daughter of Jacobo Villalobos Reyes, a colonel in the armed forces of the dictator Porfirio Diaz, and his wife Josefina Vélez, an opera singer according to some sources, or vaudeville singer according to others. She was one of five children; she had three sisters: Mercedes, Reina and Josefina and a brother, Emigdio. The Villalobos were considered a prominent, financially comfortable family in San Luis Potosí. According to Vélez's second cousin, they lived in a large home, and most of the male members received a college education.At the age of 13, her parents sent her to study at Our Lady of the Lake in San Antonio, Texas, where Vélez learned to speak English and dance. She later admitted that she liked dance class, but was otherwise a poor student.
Beginnings in Mexico and arrival in the United States (1924–26)
Vélez began her career in Mexican revues in the early 1920s. She initially performed under her paternal surname of Villalobos, but after her father returned home from the war, he was outraged that his daughter had decided to become a stage performer. She chose her maternal surname Vélez as her stage name.Their mother introduced Vélez and her sister Josefina to the popular Spanish Mexican vedette María Conesa, "La Gatita Blanca". Vélez debuted in a show led by Conesa, where she sang "Oh Charley, My Boy" and danced the shimmy. In 1924, Aurelio Campos, a young pianist and friend of the Vélez sisters, recommended Vélez to stage producers Carlos Ortega and Manuel Castro. Ortega and Castro were preparing a season revue at the Regis Theatre, and hired Vélez to join the company in March 1925. Later that year, Vélez starred in the revues Mexican Rataplan and ¡No lo tapes!. Her suggestive singing and provocative dancing was a hit with audiences, and she soon established herself as one of the main stars of vaudeville in Mexico. After a year and a half, Vélez left the revue after the manager refused to give her a raise. She then joined the Teatro Principal, but was fired after three months due to her "feisty attitude". Vélez was quickly hired by the Teatro Lirico, where her salary rose to 100 pesos a day.
Vélez, whose volatile and spirited personality and feuds with other performers were often covered by the Mexican press, also honed her ability for garnering publicity. Her most bitter rivals included the Mexican vedettes Celia Padilla, Celia Montalván, and Delia Magaña. Called La Niña Lupe because of her youth, Vélez soon established herself as one of the main stars of vaudeville in Mexico. Among her admirers were notable Mexican poets and writers like José Gorostiza and Renato Leduc.
In 1926, Frank A. Woodyard, an American who had seen Vélez perform, recommended her to stage director Richard Bennett. Bennett was looking for an actress to portray a Mexican cantina singer in his upcoming play The Dove. He sent Vélez a telegram inviting her to Los Angeles to appear in the play. Vélez had been planning to go to Cuba to perform, but quickly changed her plans and traveled to Los Angeles. However, upon arrival, she discovered that she had been replaced by another actress.
While in Los Angeles, she met the comedian Fanny Brice. Brice was taken with Vélez and later said she had never met a more fascinating personality. She promoted Vélez's career as a dancer and recommended her to Flo Ziegfeld, who hired her to perform in New York City. While Vélez was preparing to leave Los Angeles, she received a call from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer producer Harry Rapf, who offered her a screen test. Producer and director Hal Roach saw Vélez's screen test and hired her for a small role in the comic Laurel and Hardy short Sailors, Beware! She advanced to the ingenue role opposite Charley Chase in Roach's two-reel comedy What Women Did for Me.
Breakthrough and success (1927–38)
Later that year, she did a screen test for the upcoming Douglas Fairbanks full-length film The Gaucho. Fairbanks was impressed by Vélez and he quickly signed her to a contract. Upon its release in 1927, The Gaucho was a hit and critics were duly impressed with Vélez's ability to hold her own with Fairbanks, who was well-known for his spirited acting and impressive stunts.Vélez made her second major film, Stand and Deliver, directed by Cecil B. DeMille. That same year, she was named one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars. In 1929, Vélez appeared in Lady of the Pavements, directed by D. W. Griffith and Where East Is East, playing a young Chinese woman. In the Western film Wolf Song, directed by Victor Fleming, she appears with Gary Cooper. Because she was regularly cast as "exotic" or "ethnic" women that were volatile and hot-tempered, gossip columnists took to referring to Vélez as "The Mexican Hurricane", "The Mexican Wildcat", "The Mexican Madcap", "Whoopee Lupe" and "The Hot Tamale".
By 1929, the film industry was transitioning from silents to sound films. Several stars of the era saw their careers abruptly end due to heavy accents or voices that recorded poorly. Studio executives predicted that Vélez's accent would probably hamper her ability to make the transition. That idea was dispelled after she appeared in her first all-talking picture in 1929, the Rin Tin Tin vehicle Tiger Rose. The film was a hit and Vélez's sound career was established.
With the arrival of talkies, Vélez appeared in a series of Pre-Code films like Hell Harbor, The Storm, and the crime drama East Is West, with Edward G. Robinson. In 1931, she appeared in her second film for Cecil B. DeMille, Squaw Man, with Warner Baxter, and in Resurrection, directed by Edwin Carewe. In 1932, Vélez filmed The Cuban Love Song, with the popular singer Lawrence Tibbett. That same year, she had a supporting role in Kongo, with Walter Huston. She also starred in Spanish-language versions of some of her movies produced by Universal Studios like Resurrección, and Hombres en mi vida. Vélez found her niche in comedy, playing beautiful, volatile characters.
In February 1932, Vélez took a break from her film career and traveled to New York City where she was signed by Broadway impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. to take over the role of "Conchita" in the musical revue Hot-Cha!. The show also starred Bert Lahr, Eleanor Powell and Buddy Rogers.
File:Hollywoodparty.jpg|right|thumb|alt=Black and white film still showing Lupe Vélez seated and wearing feathers with Laurel and Hardy in a scene from Hollywood Party |Vélez with Laurel and Hardy in Hollywood Party
In 1933, Vélez appeared in the films The Half-Naked Truth with Lee Tracy and Hot Pepper, with Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe. Later that year, she returned to Broadway where she starred with Jimmy Durante in the musical revue Strike Me Pink. She was reunited with Durante in three 1934 movie comedies, Palooka, Strictly Dynamite and, most famously, Hollywood Party. That same year, Vélez was cast as "Slim Girl" in Laughing Boy with Ramón Novarro. The film was quietly released and largely ignored. The few reviews it received panned the film, but praised Vélez's performance. She had more success with her brief appearance in the all-comedy-cast film Hollywood Party, where she has an egg-breaking routine with Laurel and Hardy.
Although Vélez was a popular actress, MGM Studios did not renew her contract. Over the next few years, Vélez worked for various studios as a freelance actress; she also spent two years in England, where she filmed The Morals of Marcus and Gypsy Melody. She returned to Los Angeles the following year, where she signed with RKO for the Wheeler & Woolsey comedy High Flyers.
Vélez's last Broadway performance was in the 1938 musical You Never Know, by Cole Porter. The show received poor reviews from critics, but received a large amount of publicity due to the feud between Vélez and fellow cast member Libby Holman. Holman was also irritated by the attention Vélez garnered from the show with her impressions of several actresses, including Gloria Swanson, Katharine Hepburn, and Shirley Temple. The feud came to a head during a performance in New Haven, Connecticut, after Vélez punched Holman between curtain calls and gave her a black eye. The feud effectively ended the show.
Upon her return to Mexico City in 1938 to star in her first Mexican film, Vélez was greeted by ten thousand fans. The film La Zandunga directed by Fernando de Fuentes, co-starring Mexican actor Arturo de Córdova, was a critical and financial success, and Vélez was slated to appear in four more Mexican films. She instead returned to Los Angeles and went back to work for RKO.