August 16 | 15 Movies
Considered the forerunner for Latina representation in Hollywood, Mexico-born Katy Jurado (1924-2002) broke into the American film industry during its Golden Age. She acted in popular Western films of the 1950s-1960s and became the first Latin American actress nominated for an Oscar and the first to win a Golden Globe.
María Cristina Estela Marcela Jurado Garcia, known from early childhood as “Katy,” was born in Mexico City in 1924 to Luis Jurado Ochoa, a lawyer, and Vicenta García, a singer who worked for the Mexican radio station XEW (the oldest station in Latin America). Katy’s family was wealthy (having owned most of Texas for many years) and she grew up around artists and political dignitaries. Her uncle was popular Mexican musician Belisario De Jesús García; her godfather was famed Mexican actor Pedro Armedáriz; and her cousin, Emilio Portes Gil, was President of Mexico from 1928-1930.
Young Katy dreamed of following in her father’s footsteps by becoming a lawyer. However, her beauty and charm attracted filmmakers who invited her to work as an actress in the booming Mexican film industry. Among them was Emilio Fernández, one of the most prominent filmmakers at the time (best known, globally, for his 1944 movie María Candelaria which won the Palme d’Or award at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival). Fernández was eager to cast 17-year-old Katy in what was to be his first feature film, The Island of Passion (1942) – but Katy’s parents refused to give their consent. A couple of years later, when another filmmaker, Mauricio de la Serna, offered her a role in the movie No matarás (1943) she signed the contract without authorization from her parents. When they found out, they threatend to send her to boarding school, so, at just 19-years-old, Katy quickly married aspiring actor Víctor Velázquez to escape her over-protective parents and continue her career.
After having two children, Katy’s marriage to Velázquez ended just as her career began. She debuted in No matarás and went on to act in 16 more films throughout the 1940s. She starred alongside acclaimed Mexican film stars such as Pedro Infante and Sara Montiel. In 1953, she starred in Luis Buñuel’s film El bruto, for which she received an Ariel Award for Best Supporting Actress (Mexico’s equivalent of an Academy Award).
In addition to acting, multi-talented Katy worked as a movie columnist, radio reporter and bullfight critic to support her family. She was on assignment when filmmaker Budd Boetticher and actor John Wayne spotted her at a bullfight. Boetticher, who was happily surprised to learn that Katy was an experienced actress, cast her in Bullfighter and the Lady (1951), opposite Gilbert Roland, as the wife of an aging matador. Katy was not interested in working on American films, but accepted because the film would be shot in Mexico. She had rudimentary English language skills and memorized and delivered her lines phonetically!
Her strong performance brought her to the attention of Hollywood producer Stanley Kramer, who cast her in the classic Western, High Noon (1952), starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. Katy learned to speak English for the role, studying and taking classes two hours a day for two months. The plot of High Noon, which occurs in real time, centers on a town marshal named Will Kane (Cooper) whose sense of duty is tested when he must decide to either face a gang of killers alone, or leave town with his new wife, Amy (Kelly). Katy played saloon owner Helen Ramírez, former love of Kane. In one pivotal scene, Amy confronts Helen, who she believes is the reason Kane refuses to leave town. She is surprised to learn that Helen has no lingering attachment to Kane, and he hasn’t seen her in a year. Helen questions why Amy will not stay in town and stand by her husband in his hour of need, saying that if she was in Amy’s place, she would take up a gun and fight alongside Kane. Katy earned a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance.
In an interview, Katy emphasized that while High Noon was Grace Kelly’s ‘big break,’ she, herself, had been acting for many years. Though she didn’t know Kelly well, she could identify with the young actress’s drive and motivation. “I could see a girl with a lot of dignity and lot of character because she wants to be somebody in the movies. And she worked very hard in that picture. She looked weak, very tiny, but she was a very strong person. I really think she was one of the strongest movie stars I worked with.” Katy could see Kelly’s strength because she had it herself. She was famously enraged when she realized other, less experienced actresses in High Noon had more-close ups than she did. She angrily confronted director Fred Zinnemann, demanding the camera give her more attention. After her success in Mexico, she certainly did not need to appear in American films for wealth and fame. And she chose all of her pictures with prudence. She said, “I didn’t take all the films that were offered, just those with dignity.”
Notably, Marlon Brando was smitten with Katy after seeing High Noon. The two met when Brando was in Mexico filming Viva Zapata! (1952). At the time, he was involved with Movita Castaneda while having a parallel relationship with Rita Moreno. Brando didn’t hide his attraction to Latinas. He told Joseph L. Mankiewicz that he was taken with Katy’s “enigmatic eyes, black as hell, pointing at you like fiery arrows.” Katy said, “Marlon called me one night for a date, and I accepted. I knew all about Movita. I knew he had thing for Rita Moreno. Hell, it was just a date. I didn’t plan to marry him.” Their affair lasted intermittently for many years, and they maintained a loving friendship after the romance had died.
Katy went on to work on numerous American Westerns. In 1953, she had a role in Joseph Kane’s San Antone. That same year she had a role in Arrowhead with Charlton Heston and Jack Palance, playing Nita, a half-Mexican, half-Apache laundress, the love interest of Heston’s character. Katy played very few villains in her American films, but this was surely one of them. (That same year, she was captured in a portrait painted by Mexican artist, Diego Rivera.)
In 1954, actress Dolores del Río was accused of being a communist sympathizer at the height of the McCarthy era, and the U.S. government refused permission for her work in Edward Dmytryk’s film, Broken Lance, in which she was cast to play the wife of Matthew Devereaux (Spencer Tracy,) Señora Devereaux, who is Native American, but pretends to be Mexican. Señora is also mother to bi-racial Joe (Robert Wagner), who is treated prejudicially by his three white half-brothers and socially outlawed onto his mother’s reservation. This complex role required the actress to critically interpret racial passing and mixed-race child rearing. Katy was selected to replace del Río despite the initial resistance of the studio because of her youth. After viewing footage of her scenes, studio executives were impressed. So was the Academy because Katy was nominated for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
In 1955, Katy was cast in Mark Robson’s Trial, a drama about a Mexican boy accused of raping a white girl. Katy played Mrs. Chavez, the mother of the accused. That same year, she traveled to Italy to film Carol Reed’s Trapeze (1956), co-starring Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida (with whom Katy reportedly had severe friction on set).
In 1956, on the heels of marrying the American actor Ernest Borgnine, she participated in the film Man from Del Rio, one of the few Hollywood movies to have Mexican actors as the main stars. A couple of years later, she and Borgnine starred together in The Badlanders (1958). Katy and Borgnine then founded their own production company called Sanvio Corp. In 1960, they traveled to Italy, where they partnered with the producer Dino De Laurentiis in Barabbas (1961). Katy affirmed that the years she dated Borgnine were wonderful, but their relationship began to crumble when they were married. Borgnine was possessive and his jealously often resulted in him violently confronting Katy about her unromantic relationship with friends, family, and associates. Some of these instances were captured in the media at the time, but Katy often suffered alone. They divorced in 1963.
Katy’s career began to wind down in the late 1960s and she alternated her work between Hollywood and Mexico. In the United States, she played the mother of George Maharis’s character in the Mexico-border set, legal drama, A Covenant with Death (1967). She also appeared in the film Stay Away, Joe (1968) in the role of the half-Apache stepmother of Elvis Presley’s character. In Mexico, Katy was cast in Fe, esperanza y caridad (1974) as a lower-class woman who suffers a series of bureaucratic abuses as she tries to claim the remains of her dead husband. For this performance, she won the Ariel Award for Best Actress, her second Silver Ariel.
Tragically, in 1981, Katy’s first-born child, her son, Victor Hugo, perished in a car accident on the highway near Monterrey. Katy was filming on location in Mexico City at the time. Upon hearing the news, she was devastated and, in her depression, took a break from acting for some time. She said: “When my son died […] he took with him half my life. I could not mourn him as I wanted. I went to the funeral and I had to return to the movie. Every day I saw the camera, I hated her. I dedicated to the films a wonderful time I should have given to my children, but it was too late.” John Huston convinced her to resume work and she acted in his film, Under the Volcano (1984), which garnered several award nominations, including the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year. Katy also claimed that, during the filming of the movie, Huston confessed to being in love with her.
In the 1990s, Katy appeared in two Mexican novellas. She also stared in Arturo Ripstein’s El evangelio de las maravillas (1998) for which she won the Ariel Award for Best Supporting Actress, her third Silver Ariel. In 1998, Stephen Frears cast her in a cameo for his first Western The Hi-Lo Country; he called Katy his “lucky charm” for his endeavor.
In 2002, Katy made her final film appearance in the Mexican film, Un secreto de Esperanza written and directed by Leopoldo Laborde. She died that same year at the age of 78-years-old at her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Laborde’s film was released posthumously and went on to win several awards in film festivals around the world.
