Ricardo Montalbán
Ricardo Montalbán was born in Mexico City, but grew up in the city of Torreon, the son of Castilian Spanish émigrés Ricarda Merino and Jenaro Montalbán, a store manager. He had a sister, Carmen, and two brothers, Pedro and the actor Carlos Montalbán. As a teenager, Ricardo moved to Los Angeles to live with Carlos. The two went to New York City in 1940, and Ricardo earned a minor role in the play, Her Cardboard Lover.
In 1941 he appeared in his first motion pictures, three-minute musicals produced for the Soundies film jukeboxes. Montalbán appeared in many of the New York-produced Soundies as an extra or as a member of a singing chorus (usually billed as Men and Maids of Melody). Ricardo Montalbán’s first starring film was He’s a Latin from Staten Island (1941), in which the young Latin (billed simply as “Ricardo”) played the title role of a guitar-strumming gigolo, accompanied by an offscreen vocal by Gus Van.
Late in 1941 Montalbán learned that his mother was dying, so he returned to Mexico. He made a dozen Spanish-language films and became a star in his homeland.
Montalbán recalled that when he arrived in Hollywood in 1943, studios wanted to change his name to Ricky Martin. He frequently portrayed Asian characters – mostly of Japanese background, as in Sayonara and the Hawaii Five-O episode “Samurai”. His first leading role was in the 1949 film Border Incident with actor George Murphy. He was the first Hispanic actor to appear on the front cover of Life magazine on November 21, 1949. During the 1950s and 1960s, he was one of only a handful of actively working Hispanic actors.
Many of his early roles were in Westerns in which he played character parts, usually as an “Indian” or as a “Latin Lover”. In 1950 he was cast against type, playing a Cape Cod police officer in the film Mystery Street. In 1957, he played Nakamura in the Oscar-winning film Sayonara.
From 1957 to 1959 he starred in the Broadway musical Jamaica, singing several light-hearted calypso numbers opposite Lena Horne.
Montalbán starred in radio, such as the internationally syndicated program “Lobo del Mar” (Seawolf), in which he was cast as the captain of a vessel which became part of some adventure at each port it visited. This 30-minute weekly show aired in many Spanish-speaking countries until the early 1970s.
He married Georgiana Young (née Georgiana Belzer), an actress and model in 1944; they had four children: Laura, Mark, Anita and Victor. Georgiana was the half-sister of the actresses Sally Blane, Polly Ann Young, and movie and television star Loretta Young, who nicknamed her “Georgie”. Georgiana’s niece is Judy Lewis, the daughter of Loretta Young and Clark Gable. After sixty-three years of marriage, Georgiana Belzer de Montalbán died on November 13, 2007, at the age of eighty-four.
Ricardo was a practising Roman Catholic and once had said that his religion was the “most important thing” in his life. In 1998, Pope John Paul II named him a Knight of the Order of St. Gregory the Great, the highest honor a Roman Catholic lay person can receive from the Church. He recorded a Public Service Announcement celebrating his American citizenship in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty in 1986.
Montalbán’s autobiography, Reflections: A Life in Two Worlds, was published in January, 1980 by Doubleday.
Montalbán died on January 14, 2009 at his home in Los Angeles, California at the age of 88. According to his son-in-law Gilbert Smith, Montalbán died of “complications from advancing age”. His cause of death was later revealed to be congestive heart failure.
He is buried next to his wife in Culver City’s Holy Cross Cemetery.
