Dolores del Río: Beauty in Light and Shade by Linda B. Hall (review)

Linda Hall provides a wonderfully written and compelling biography of one of the most famous and beautiful women of the twentieth century: actress Dolores del Río. She traces critical stages in Del Rio’s life, from her sheltered upbringing as a daughter of a Mexican elite family, to her early marriage and transition to Hollywood starlet in the 1920s, where she figured in silent and then talking pictures, and to her return south where she became a pivotal actress of the Mexican Golden Age of Cinema of the 1940s. In later decades, as Del Río continued working in the United States and Mexico in both film and theater, her peers not only crowned her with honors, but she found her earlier performances and celebrity revived by technology, as a younger generation viewed her performances on the newly invented television.

Rather than placing a primary focus on the films themselves, Hall concentrates on Del Río’s professional and personal life through analyses of letters, interviews, film contracts, movie theater posters, movie reviews, and local newspapers. These track the ups and downs of her career, her multiple husbands, her real and possible lovers, and her famous friends. Woven throughout are the pervasive themes of gender, sexuality, race, transborder crossings, changing technologies, and celebrity in Del Río’s career.

First, and never to be understated, was that every camera loved Dolores del Río. Still, a persistent theme of her career was the continuing mandate to negotiate even her astonishing beauty through the constraints of class, gender, race, and Mexican-ness. After her 1925 arrival in Hollywood Del Rio herself, along with her directors and the film studios, emphasized her origins as an elite Mexican, her status as a lady playing ladylike parts, and her whiteness, even as she transgressed social rules to become an actress. In later years, with her celebrity assured, she assumed roles that more emphasized her sexuality or challenged racial norms—she maintained her status of whiteness even as she played indigenous women. When Hollywood parts diminished in the early 1940s, Del Río returned to Mexico. She collaborated with director Emilio “El Indio” Fernández and co-star Pedro Amendáriz to produce some of the classics of Mexican cinema, including María Candelaria. She sporadically revisited Hollywood, once for a cameo in 1960 playing the Indian mother of Elvis.

Del Río was herself a celebrity, and she moved in the circles of the famous. Hall traces her Hollywood business and social friendships and the storied parties that included Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplain, Orson Welles, and William Randoph Hearst. Del Río also maintained her contacts in Mexico, which were intensified when she relocated to the capital. There she counted Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco, and Pablo Neruda, as well as director Emilio “El Indio” Fernandez and co-star Pedro Armendáriz, among her intimate friends.

If there is any flaw in this marvelous biography, it seems rooted in the very ambiguities and opaqueness of del Río’s life. She appeared in interviews that were heavily staged and edited, and she never wrote an autobiography. Hall deftly surmounts such challenges by writing “around” the business and personal life of del Río, although gaps remain. How did she overcome the dominance of husbands, directors, and studios to chart her own path? Were her first two husbands gay? Did she engage in affairs with Greta Garbo or Frida Kahlo? How much wealth did she eventually accumulate, given the fabulous sums paid to pre-Depression stars? Hall notes that Del Rio in the years before 1929 had invested in property, rather than the stock market.

Hall has offered an engaging look into what historians can likely uncover of this enigmatic star. She concludes that Del Río “led a rich, fulfilling up-and-down...