Born: 3 August 1904, Mexico
Died: 11 April 1983
Country most active: United States, Mexico
Also known as: Lolita Dolores Asunsolo y Martinez, María de los Dolores Asúnsolo y López Negrete
Mexican actress Dolores del Río is considered the first Latin American woman to become a major Hollywood film star, with a career that lasted from the 1920s Hollywood silent films into the Golden Age of Mexican cinema in the ‘40s and ‘50s and later expanding into television and theater.
Born María de los Dolores Asúnsolo y López Negrete into a wealthy aristocratic Durango family in 1904, her family soon lost their fortune in the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s, though her immediate family escaped relatively unscathed. At 17, she married the son of another wealthy family.
In 1925, a visiting American filmmaker, Edwin Carewe, convinced her husband that del Río could have a career as a film actress and the couple moved to Hollywood. She made her debut in Joanna, directed by Carewe and released later that year. It was followed by several more films in 1926, including What Price Glory?, the second-highest grossing film of the year. She worked steadily throughout the remainder of the 1920s, but her marriage deteriorated, with the couple separating in 1928 and del Río filing for divorce, only for her husband to die in Germany six months later. Simultaneously, Carewe was engaging in a long campaign of sexual harassment and tried to pressure her to marry him, preparing to divorce his wife and spreading rumors that they were romantically involved. Her last film with him was 1929’s Evangeline. After its premiere, she told reporters, “Mr. Carewe and I are just friends and companions in the art of the cinema. I will not marry Mr. Carewe.” When she canceled her exclusivity contract with him, he brought charges against her for breach of contract and she paid to settle the matter. Despite his subsequent efforts to destroy her career, she was able to successfully transition from silent films to talkies in the 1930s, and married the influential MGM art director Cedric Gibbons in 1930.
Drawing on dance training from her teen years, del Río became popular in musical films, dancing performing opposite the likes of Fred Astaire and Al Jolson. But her Hollywood career waned in the late 1930s, and an affair with Orson Welles led to her second divorce in 1941. Her later break-up with Welles combined with the death of her father led her to return to Mexico in 1943, later stating “I wanted to go the way of the art. Stop being a star and become an actress, and that I could only do in Mexico. I wish to choose my own stories, my own director, and camera man. I can accomplish this better in Mexico. I wanted to return to Mexico, a country that was mine and I did not know. I felt the need to return to my country.”
1943’s Flor silvestre was del Río’s first Spanish-language film, and its box office success established that she was still a bankable star. María Candelaria (1944) was the first Mexican film to be screened at the Cannes International Film Festival, where it became the first Latin American film to win the Grand Prix (later renamed the Palme d’Or). Her performance in Las Abandonadas (1944) earned her the Mexican Academy of Film Arts and Sciences’ Silver Ariel Award for Best Actress.
All three films, as well as her fourth, Bugambilia (1945), were directed by Emilio Fernández, who became increasingly demanding, threatening and violent over the course of the working relationship as del Río repeatedly rejected his sexual advances. After the completion of Bugambilia, she declared she would never work with him again. In addition to her Mexican films of this period, she starred opposite Henry Fonda in The Fugitive, which was filmed in Mexico. She also consented to work with Fernández again on La Malquerida (1949) opposite Columba Domínguez playing her daughter. Fernández had married Domínguez in 1947 when she was just a teenager (his first wife had been only 16 when they married in 1941).
Del Río won two more Silver Ariel Awards for her performances in Doña Perfecta (1951) and El Niño y la Niebla (1953). In 1957, she was selected as vice president that year’s Cannes Film Festival jury, and was the first woman to sit on the jury.
In 1959, she married American millionaire Lewis Riley, whom she’d met in 1949. The couple had started their own company, Producciones Visuales, producing theater projects featuring del Río. In addition to producing and performing in Mexican theater and appearing on American television shows, she acted in movies such as the Italian film More Than a Miracle (1967) and 1960’s Flaming Star, in which she played Elvis Presley’s mother. She remained active into the 1970s, and her final film role was in 1978’s The Children of Sanchez.
In addition to her various relationships with men, del Río was rumored to be part of Marlene Dietrich’s “sewing circle of discreet sapphic actresses in Hollywood, and her relationships with Dietrich and Greta Garbo may have been romantic.