Santo Domingo, November 17, 2011

“The Legend of María Montez has not will and will never die.”

Margarita Vincens de Morales, Celinés Toribio, Sonia Fritz y Marcela Fuentes all agreed that the extraordinary qualities of this Dominican legend will live on forever.

“The legend of María Montez has not and will never die” said Dominican actress Celinés Toribio, speaking at the “María Montez: Glamorous Rebel of Hollywood” panel in which she participated with the writer Margarita Vincens de Morales, filmmaker Sonia Fritz and scriptwriter Marcela Fuentes Beraín.

Vincens de Morales said that María Montez was not just a beautiful but also a unique and determined woman who, as a result of her sacrifice and love of acting, she left her home in Barahona at 20 to pursue her dream in New York.

“María Montez was the queen of Technicolor and her life will always be told in the annals of film thanks to her beauty, the color of her skin and her rise to stardom at the very moment when color film was beginning to be used in movie making,” explained Margarita Vincens de Morales. “When she arrived in New York, she attracted attention because of her character and the way she dressed. A year after she got to New York, she landed her first job in the movies.”

Celinés Toribio pointed out that although María Montez was a sex symbol in her time, it was not controversial. She said that one of her most admirable qualities was her self-confidence and her determination to fulfill her dream “to be a star of the seventh art.”

Later, scriptwriter Marcela Fuentes spoke about how to get one’s script from the paper to the screen. She explained that to adapt a novel to film, it is necessary to know how to select the words and appropriate scenes in order to properly convey the emotions and sentiments to the viewers. She said a scriptwriter is a person who narrates with images, the director gives the creative force to the piece and the author is the interpretive force of the story.

To end the panel, filmmaker Sonia Fritz shared various scenes from movies which María Montez played in such as “Portrait of a Murder” and “Arabian Nights.”

Biography
María África Gracia Vidal (1912 - 1951) was a Dominican actress who gained fame and popularity in the 1940s as an exotic beauty starring in a series of movies filmed in Technicolor. Her screen image was that of a seductress dressed in fanciful costumes and sparkling jewels.

Throughout her career, Maria Montez acted in 26 films, 21 of which were made in the United States and five in Europe.
Having travelled to New York at the end of the 1930’s, Maria’s first job was to pose for the cover of a magazine which paid her $50. After a series of events and ingenious moves on her part, she managed to attract the attention of producers and directors that landed her major roles at Universal Pictures in such films as “Arabian Nights,” “White Savage,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” “Cobra Woman,” “Gypsy Wildcat” and “Sudan.”

Ms. Montez also wrote three books: Forever Is a Long Time, Hollywood Wolves I Have Tamed and Reunion in Lilith, of which only the first two were published.

While working in Hollywood, she met French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont and they married on July 13, 1943. They had a daughter in 1946, María Cristina (known as Tina Aumont) then moved to Paris where Maria Montez passed away at the age of thirty nine.