Lupe Vélez

Lupe Vélez
File:Lupe Velez in Laughing Boy trailer 2.jpg from the film Laughing Boy (1934)
Born	María Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez
Years active	1927-1944

Lupe Vélez (July 18, 1908 – December 13, 1944) was a Mexican American actress.

Early life

Vélez was born María Guadalupe Villalobos Vélez in the city of San Luis Potosí, 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 in Texas before finding work as a sales assistant. She took dancing lessons and in 1924, made her performing debut at the Teatro Principal. She moved to California that year and was first cast in movies by Hal Roach.

Film career

with Ramón Novarro in Laughing Boy (1934)

Vélez's first feature-length film was Douglas Fairbanks's The Gaucho (1927); the next year, she was named one of the WAMPAS 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 with Laurel and Hardy in Hollywood Party and her dynamic presence opposite Jimmy Durante in Palooka (both 1934) are typically enthusiastic Vélez performances. She was featured in the final Wheeler & Woolsey comedy, High Flyers (1937), doing impersonations of Simone Simon, Dolores del Rio, and Shirley Temple.

Vélez was now nearing 30 and hadn't yet become a major star. Disappointed, she left Hollywood for Broadway. In New York, she landed a role in You Never Know, a short-lived Cole 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 for RKO Radio Pictures, The Girl from Mexico. She established such a rapport with co-star Leon 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, and Columbia Pictures in addition to the Spitfire films. She was very popular with Spanish 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 athlete Johnny 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 of Emile 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 an illegitimate 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.

A well-known urban myth tells that Vélez was ultimately found in the morning with her head in the toilet. Variations on this story include versions in which she had either drowned in the toilet or that she had tripped and was found in the toilet with a broken neck. Kenneth Anger's 1959 Hollywood Babylon tale of her death, though unsubstantiated, was the basis for the 1965 Andy Warhol film Lupe starring Edie Sedgwick. It has continued to filter through popular culture, in the pilot episode of the television series Frasier and again in The Simpsons episode "Homer's Phobia".

Filmography

Year	Film	Role	Other notes
1927	What Women Did for Me	uncredited	short subject
	Sailors, Beware!	Baroness Behr (uncredited)	Laurel and Hardy silent short
	The Gaucho	The Mountain Girl
1928	Stand and Deliver	Jania
1929	Hollywood Snapshots #11	Herself	short subject
	Lady of the Pavements	Nanon del Rayon	aka Lady of the Night (UK)
	The Wolf Song	Lola Salazar
	Where East Is East	Toyo Haynes
	Tiger Rose	Rose
1930	Hell Harbor	Anita Morgan
	The Storm	Manette Fachard
	East Is West	Ming Toy	Spanish language version was filmed, also starring Vélez
1931	Resurrection	Katusha Maslova
	Resurrección	Katyusha Maslova
	The Squaw Man	Naturich
	The Cuban Love Song	Nenita Lopez
1932	The Voice of Hollywood No. 13	Herself	short subject
	Men in Her Life	Julia Clark	Spanish language version of 1931 film
	The Broken Wing	Lolita
	Kongo	Tula
	The Half Naked Truth	Teresita
1933	Hot Pepper	Pepper
	Mr. Broadway	Herself	documentary
1934	Palooka	Nina Madero	aka Joe Palooka
	Strictly Dynamite	Vera Mendez
	Laughing Boy	Slim Girl
	Hollywood Party	The Jaguar Woman Jane in Schnarzan sequence
1935	The Morals of Marcus	Carlotta
1936	Gypsy Melody	Mila
1937	High Flyers	Maria Juanita Rosita Anita Moreno del Valle
	Stardust	Carla de Huelva	aka He Loved an Actress (USA)
	La Zandunga	Lupe
1939	The Girl from Mexico	Carmelita Fuentes
1940	Mexican Spitfire	Carmelita Lindsay
	Mexican Spitfire Out West	Carmelita Lindsay
1941	Recordar es vivir		short subject
	Six Lessons from Madame La Zonga	Madame La Zonga
	Mexican Spitfire's Baby	Carmelita Lindsay
	Honolulu Lu	Consuelo Cordoba
	Playmates	Carmen del Toro
1942	Mexican Spitfire at Sea	Carmelita Lindsay
	Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost	Carmelita Lindsay
	Mexican Spitfire's Elephant	Carmelita Lindsay
1943	Ladies' Day	Pepita Zorita
	Redhead from Manhattan	Rita Manners/Elaine Manners
	Mexican Spitfire's Blessed Event	Carmelita Lindsay
1944	Nana	Nana

External links

• Lupe Vélez at IMDb
• Lupe Vélez grave at Find A Grave
• [1] "Did Lupe Vélez Really Die On the Toilet?" at The Straight Dope
• The fourth chapter of Tex(t)-Mex: Seductive Hallucination of the "Mexican" in America by 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.
• Photographs of Lupe Vélez