Biography of María Félix | Mexican film actress.

(Maria de los Angeles Güereña; Alamos, 1914 - city of Mexico, 2002) Mexican film actress. Equipped with a enigmatic Latin beauty, in his extensive filmography (which includes melodramas peasants and revolutionaries, urban dramas, and adaptations of novels naturalistic and realistic), embodied a haughty and disdainful creature who rebelled against the subjugation of women to the arrogant male. Halfway between the Devourer of men and the unattainable beauty ideal, as no one represented the archetype of the femme fatale.

María Félix

Born in the ranch El Quiriego, near Álamos, Nina moved to Guadalajara, where he won a beauty contest. She was married to the composer Agustín Lara (author of Granada and the schottische Madrid, among others) and with the famous singer and actor Jorge Negrete, with whom he formed, in many films, a couple protagonist who has already passed to the history of Mexican cinema.

Maria Felix was discovered by director Miguel Zacarías, who tried, and succeeded in enhancing the "passionate coldness" which characterized its actions. With Miguel Zacarías debuted in cinema in 1942, playing the film El Peñón de las ánimas, who started the list of films in which shared cast with which would later become her third husband, Jorge Negrete. He worked throughout Latin America and also in Europe, especially in Spain, France and Italy, where he attained great popularity.

The Director Fernando Palacios made it to study dramatic art. With this director got his first important success in the woman without a soul (1943), film which took body your archetype of beautiful and haughty woman. In the same year 1943 won him the starring role of tape Doña Bárbara, based on an adaptation of the homonymous work of Rómulo Gallegos and directed by Fernando de Fuentes. In this film plays a female dominant, cruel, superb the classic "Devourer of men" (in American cinema called "vamp", a term from the apocope of vamp or femme fatale), which would become its predominant characterization throughout all of his film career.

Maria Felix and Doña Bárbara (1943)

La Doña, as they used to call it, soon became a living myth of Mexican cinema. The Mexican Academy of cinematographic arts and Sciences awarded the Premio Ariel for best actress three times: in 1947, by love; in 1949, by Río Escondido (both films, like damn beauty, masterfully directed by Indian Fernandez), and in 1951, by Doña Diabla.

Noteworthy is its interpretation in the film Enamorada (episode of any of the multiple Mexican revolutions), where María Felix is at the same time, and in fight with itself, the instinctive, the beautiful, the elusive and dismissive, the brava, the subject, the exhausted, girlfriend... The last frame of this film (the Revolutionary Party defeated and girlfriend run, barefoot and breathless, to join him and share his fate) can be compared to the flat end of the Morocco of Stenberg, Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich as protagonists, although the gesture of María Felix is more instinctive and, therefore, more convincing.

In the Devourer (1946)

The titles of the movies in acted them form an endless series. Since its inception, María Felix worked almost tirelessly, required by directors and producers Mexican or foreign, to the extent that, on occasions, came to star in three or four films per year. This was, for example, what happened in 1946, when he played two films revealing title (the Devourer and all women) and was the unforgettable star of love; also in the following year, in 1947, he worked in the kneeling goddess, Rio Escondido and may God forgive me!

Other films must mention are La monja Alférez, contained in images the eventful biography of Catalina de Erauso, adventurer who fought as a soldier in the Spanish army of the 17TH century; Amok, adapted from the novel by Stefan Zweig made in 1944 by the director Antonio Momplet; Mare Nostrum (1948), somewhat gimmicky tape that corresponds to its Spanish stage, where the almost slavish subservience of the dramatic line to the brilliance of the beauty of María Felix hurts not only the continuity and efficiency of the story, but also harms the expressive sincerity of own actress and their possible identification with heroin; Tragic spell and La Bella Otero, biography not too faithful of the famous cuplés, both filmed in 1954; and the ambitious (1959), one of the films made by Luis Buñuel Aragonese in your fertile stage of Mexican exile.

They would complete the list Juana Gallo (1961), La Valentina (1964), the glass house (directed in 1967 by Luis Alcoriza), La Generala (1970) and eternal splendor (1978, directed by Jaime Humberto Hermosillo). In 1970 he participated also in the television series La Constitution. In what refers to the international scene, we could put on their collaboration in the French can-canfilm, directed in 1954 by Jean Renoir. It takes place an evocation of the Montmartre of 1890, which concludes with a brilliant and frantic scene of dancing at the Moulin Rouge. In 1981, the Mexican Academy of cinematographic arts and Sciences a special Ariel recognition awarded to his long and fruitful film career, as well as for his contribution to the Mexican interpretive panorama.

Extracted from the website: Biografías y Vidas