Maria Montez Collection

Maria Montez
(1912 – 1951)

If you have never had the dream of making it big in Hollywood it might be hard to understand what a powerful force the dream can be. It is hard to imagine what a person might be willing to do to make it come true. When and if it does come true, sometimes it doesn’t seem to mean as much as the dreamer thought it would.

Little Maria Africa Gracia Vidal grew up as a pretty and happy girl in Barahona, Dominican Republic, born 1912. She was one of ten children born to a worker in the Spanish Consulate, and was given the name Maria Africa to honor her father’s birthplace in the Canary Islands. As a girl, Maria was obsessed with the movies and becoming a star. Her friends laughed when she made school presentations using the flamboyant and exaggerated expressions and mannerisms she saw on the screen.

Her "official biography" would later be the imaginings of a studio publicity department, claiming that she would travel widely, received an education in Europe, and found love while living in Ireland. There is no actual evidence that she left her hometown until a trip to New York with her husband, an employee of The First National City Bank of New York, William McFeeters, who married Maria when she was 17. 

When McFeeters was recalled to New York in 1939, his young wife found a job as a magazine covergirl. New York artist McLelland Barclay saw in Maria the prototype of the International Woman, a girl of exceptional exotic beauty and indeterminate racial background. He helped her to get a lunch date with a Hollywood talent agent at Club 21, which led to screen tests with Universal and RKO. They felt that going with RKO would be better for Maria’s career, but when they failed to make an offer she went with Universal. She chose the name Montez in honor of Lola Montez, a dancer whom her father had admired.

Maria’s first task was to reacquire the Dominican accent that she had lost when she moved to New York. Universal began using her as the exotic other woman in a series of TechniColor costume adventures, including Arabian Nights (1942), White Savage (1943), Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944) and Cobra Woman (1944). Her Hollywood career had a setback when she refused to appear in Frontier Gal (1945) and was replaced by Yvonne DeCarlo. Although Motez had been called "The Queen of Technicolor", as the War came to a close audiences became bored with the sort of romances she specialized.

Maria moved to Paris with her second husband, actor Jean-Pierre Aumont, and tried to revive her career in French cinema with moderate success. In September 1951 Maria apparently suffered a heart attack while in her bathtub and drowned. She was just 39 years old.