- Lupe Vélez
Infobox actor
name = Lupe Vélez
imagesize = 260px
caption = from the film "Laughing Boy" (1934)
birthname = María Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez
birthdate =July 18 ,1908
deathdate = death date and age|1944|12|13|1908|07|18
location =San Luis Potosí, San Luis Potosí ,Mexico
othername =
homepage =
academyawards =
screenactorsguildawards =
spouse =
yearsactive = 1927-1944Lupe Vélez (
July 18 ,1908 –December 13 ,1944 ) was aMexican actress.Early life
Vélez was born María Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez in the city of San Luis Potosí in
Mexico , the daughter of an army officer and his wife, an opera singer. Her father refused to let her use his last name in theater, so she used her mother's maiden name. Lupe was educated at a convent school inTexas before finding work as a sales assistant. She took dancing lessons and in 1924, made her performing debut at the "Teatro Principal". She moved toCalifornia that year and was first cast in movies byHal Roach .Film career
Vélez's first feature-length film was
Douglas Fairbanks 's (1927); the next year, she was named one of theWAMPAS Baby Stars , the young starlets deemed to be most promising for movie stardom. Most of her early films cast her in exotic or ethnic roles (Hispanic, Native American, French, Russian, even Asian). Within a few years Vélez found her niche in comedies, playing beautiful but volatile foils to comedy stars. Her slapstick battle withLaurel and Hardy in "Hollywood Party" and her dynamic presence oppositeJimmy Durante in "Palooka" (both 1934) are typically enthusiastic Vélez performances. She was featured in the finalWheeler & Woolsey comedy, "High Flyers" (1937), doing impersonations ofSimone Simon ,Dolores del Rio , andShirley Temple . Vélez was now nearing 30 and hadn't yet become a major star. Disappointed, she leftHollywood for Broadway. In New York, she landed a role in "You Never Know", a short-livedCole Porter musical. After the run of "You Never Know", Vélez looked for film work in other countries. Returning to Hollywood in 1939, she snared the lead in a B comedy forRKO Radio Pictures , "The Girl from Mexico". She established such a rapport with co-starLeon Errol that RKO made a quick sequel, "Mexican Spitfire", which became a very popular series. Vélez perfected her comic character, indulging in broken-English malaprops, troublemaking ideas, and sudden fits of temper bursting into torrents of Spanish invective. She occasionally sang in these films, and often displayed a talent for hectic, visual comedy. Vélez enjoyed making these films and can be seen openly breaking up at Leon Errol's comic ad libs. The "Spitfire" films rejuvenated Lupe Vélez's career, and for the next few years she starred in musical and comedy features for RKO,Universal Pictures , andColumbia Pictures in addition to the Spitfire films. In one of her last films, Columbia's "Redhead from Manhattan," she played a dual role: one in her exaggerated comic dialect, and the other in her actual speaking voice, which was surprisingly fluid and had only traces of a Mexican accent.Lupe Vélez was very popular with Spanish-speaking audiences, and lent her services toward improving the film industry in
Mexico .Romances
Emotionally generous, passionate, and high-spirited, Vélez had a number of highly publicized affairs, including a particularly emotionally draining one with
Gary Cooper , before marrying Olympic athleteJohnny Weissmuller (of 'Tarzan' fame) in 1933. The fraught marriage lasted five years; they repeatedly split and finally divorced in 1938. In 1943, she returned to Mexico and starred in an adaptation ofEmile Zola 's "Nana" (1944), which was well received. Subsequently, she returned to Hollywood.Death
In the mid-1940s, she had a relationship with the young actor Harald Maresch, and became pregnant with his child. Vélez, following her Catholic upbringing, refused to have an
abortion . Unable to face the shame of giving birth to anillegitimate child, she decided to take her own life. Her suicide note read, "To Harald, may God forgive you and forgive me too but I prefer to take my life away and our baby's before I bring him with shame or killing him, Lupe." She retired to bed after taking an overdose of sleeping pills. According to newspaper accounts, her body was found by her secretary and companion for ten years, Beulah Kinder.Andy Warhol's film, "Lupe"(1965), is loosely based on this fateful night. Suggesting that she was found with her head in the toilet due to nausea caused by the overdose. However, Kinder reports finding Velez peacefully asleep in her bed.
There is skepticism surrounding whether it was simply the shame of bearing an illegitimate child that led Velez to end her life. Throughout her life she showed signs of extreme emotion; mania and depression. Consequently it has been suggested that Velez suffered from bipolar disorder, which left untreated ultimately led to her suicide. After all, Velez was known for her defiance of contemporary moral convention, and it seems unlikely that she could not have reconciled an "illegitimate child." [Fregoso, Rosa Linda. (2007) Lupe Velez: Queen of the B's. In Myra Mendible (ed.) From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture. Austin University of Texas Press.]
Filmography
References
External links
*
* [http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=6741 Lupe Vélez grave] atFind A Grave
* [http://straightdope.com/mailbag/mlupevelez.html Straight Dope Staff Report: Did Lupe Vélez really drown in the toilet? ] at straightdope.com "Did Lupe Vélez Really Die On the Toilet?" at The Straight Dope
* The fourth chapter of [http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/nertex.html "Tex(t)-Mex] : Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in America" by [http://literature.sdsu.edu/textmex/ W. A. Nericcio] , focuses on the life and death of Lupe Vélez and is entitled, "Lupe Vélez Regurgitated or Jesus’s Kleenex: Cautionary, Indigestion-inspiring Ruminations on "Mexicans" in "American" Toilets".
* [http://film.virtual-history.com/person.php?personid=1221 Photographs of Lupe Vélez]Persondata
NAME= Vélez, Lupe
ALTERNATIVE NAMES= Vélez, María Guadalupe Villalobos
SHORT DESCRIPTION=Actor
DATE OF BIRTH=July 18 ,1908
PLACE OF BIRTH=San Luis Potosí, San Luis Potosí ,Mexico
DATE OF DEATH=December 13 ,1944
PLACE OF DEATH=
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