Fortunio Bonanova

About Fortunio Bonanova

Who is it?: Actor, Soundtrack, Director
Birth Day: January 13, 1895
Birth Place:  Palma, Balearic Islands, Spain, Spain
Died On: 2 April 1969(1969-04-02) (aged 74)\nWoodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Birth Sign: Aquarius
Occupation: Actor, opera singer
Years active: 1922–1964

Fortunio Bonanova Net Worth

Fortunio Bonanova was born on January 13, 1895 in  Palma, Balearic Islands, Spain, Spain, is Actor, Soundtrack, Director. Spanish-born Josep Lluis Moll studied music in Madrid and at the Paris Conservatoire. Having changed his name to Fortunio Bonanova (which, at the time, would have sounded more becoming of a budding musical star), he went on to make his international opera debut as a baritone in 1922. A protégé of the famous Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin Sr., he was hailed as a major talent and launched on a successful tour of Europe and South America in 1923. For most of the 1920's, he was based in Paris, performing and writing plays and short stories.His first fling with the movies took place in 1922, when he starred in the title role of Don Juan Tenorio (1922), a Spanish production filmed in Barcelona. During the late 20's and early 30's, he ran his own repertory company in South America. Bonanova subsequently moved to the United States, settling down permanently after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. While in the U.S., he divided his time between appearing on stage (including two performances on Broadway) and acting in small supporting roles in Hollywood. His looks and temperament inevitably got him typecast as excitable, or pompous Latin Americans, Spaniards or Italians. He often played aristocratic dons, opera singers, managers or police chiefs, either humorous and serious.Many of his appearances on screen were all too brief. At his most memorable, he was the exasperated opera coach Signor Matiste, desperately trying not to lose patience with his talentless pupil, the wife of Citizen Kane (1941). He was also effective as down-on-his-luck Sam Galopis, clumsily attempting insurance fraud in Double Indemnity (1944); and as Carmen Trivago, a sad wannabe opera star, who sees his priceless collection of Caruso recordings smashed to pieces by a brutish Mike Hammer, in the process of coercing him to divulge information in Kiss Me Deadly (1955).Bonanova played a multitude of similar roles until his retirement in the mid-1960's. He died in Woodland Hills, California, in April 1969 at the age of 74.
Fortunio Bonanova is a member of Actor

💰 Net worth: Under Review

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Biography/Timeline

1921

Also in 1921, he appeared in a silent film of Don Juan Tenorio by the brothers Baños, which was shown the following year in New York City and Hollywood. He later directed his own Don Juan in 1924.

1927

In 1927, he acted in Love of Sonya, directed by Albert Parker and starring Gloria Swanson. In 1932 he had small parts in Hollywood productions featuring Joan Bennett and Mary Astor. In the same period, he appeared in New York in several operas as well as the zarzuelas La Canción del Olvido ("The song of forgetting"), La Duquesa del Tabarín ("The Duchess of Tabarín"), Los Gavilanes, and La Montería. In 1934, he returned to Spain, where he had a major role in the film El Desaparecido ("The disappeared one") written and directed by Antonio Graciani. In 1935 he acted and sang in the film Poderoso Caballero ("A Big Guy"), directed by Màximo Nossik.

1936

In 1936, with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he returned to the United States, where he played the role of Captain Bill in a film called Capitán Tormenta, directed by Jules Bernhardt. A sequence of increasingly larger acting and singing roles mostly in English-language films followed, especially after 1940. Among his roles were Signor Matiste, Susan Alexander Kane's opera coach in Citizen Kane (1941); General Sebastiano in Five Graves to Cairo (1943); Don Miguel in The Black Swan (1942); Fernando in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943); Sam Garlopis in Double Indemnity (1944); and a singing Christopher Columbus in Where Do We Go From Here?. He continued for the next several decades in a miscellany of character roles.

1941

Bonanova was also an uncredited technical consultant for the film Blood and Sand (1941), and produced and appeared in the Spanish-language film La Inmaculada (a name of the Virgin Mary, "Immaculate")(1939).

1947

Bonanova played the father of twins Esther Williams, and Ricardo Montalbán in the 1947 film Fiesta. In 1949, Bonanova collaborated with Ambrose Barker (a former music hall performer who had, with his partner/wife, Peggy Wynne, had some success on the British colonial circuit in the 1920s–1930s) on a musical entitled "Glamor/Glamour is the Gimmick." It got bad reviews—what may have been popular and witty in the early 1930s didn’t make it in 1949.

1950

In the 1950s, he appeared in an episode of I Love Lucy as a fake psychic who uses his stage apparatus to make it appear as though Lucy is able to speak Spanish to her mother-in-law.

1952

In 1952, he played an Italian opera singer, Anthony Branchetti, in the 4th episode of My Little Margie where Margie helps her father by convincing Mr. Branchetti to appear at a party in his honor to impress a reluctant client of Honeywell & Todd.

1953

In 1953 he played Lou Costello's Uncle Bozzo in the Abbott & Costello episode of "Uncle Bozzo's Visit."

1969

Bonanova died in 1969 in Woodland Hills, California of a cerebral hemorrhage and is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.