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Fortunio Bonanova

Fortunio Bonanova

Actor · 1895 – 1969 · Palma de Mallorca, Mallorca, Balearic Islands, Spain

Fortunio Bonanova, pseudonym of Josep Lluís Moll, (13 January 1895 – 2 April 1969) was a Spanish baritone singer and a film, theater, and television actor. He occasionally worked as a producer and director. According to Lluis Fàbregas Cuixart, the pseudonym Fortunio Bonanova referred to his desire to seek fortune, and his love of the Bonanova neighborhood in his native Palma. As a young man, living under his birthname, he was a professional telegraph operator. He studied music with the Italian Giovachini. In 1921, he debuted as a singer in Tannhäuser, at the Teatre Principal in Palma. That year, along with a group of Majorcan intellectuals and Jorge Luis Borges (who was briefly living in Majorca with his parents and sister), he signed the Ultraist Manifesto, using the name Fortunio Bonanova. 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. In 1927, he acted in Love of Sunya, 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. 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.

Movies24

  • Movie8.0

    Citizen Kane

    1941 · 6.2K votes

  • Movie8.1

    Double Indemnity

    1944 · 2.1K votes

  • Movie7.4

    An Affair to Remember

    1957 · 527 votes

  • Movie7.2

    Kiss Me Deadly

    1955 · 420 votes

  • Movie7.2

    The Mark of Zorro

    1940 · 240 votes

  • Movie6.5

    The Black Swan

    1942 · 98 votes

  • Movie6.2
  • Movie6.5

    For Whom the Bell Tolls

    1943 · 216 votes

  • Movie6.8

    Adventures of Don Juan

    1948 · 45 votes

  • Movie6.5

    Blood and Sand

    1941 · 67 votes

  • Movie7.0

    Five Graves to Cairo

    1943 · 157 votes

  • Movie6.7

    Going My Way

    1944 · 199 votes

  • Movie6.0

    The Fugitive

    1947 · 50 votes

  • Movie6.3

    The Moon Is Blue

    1953 · 53 votes

  • Movie6.4

    Whirlpool

    1950 · 103 votes

  • Movie5.8

    September Affair

    1950 · 24 votes

  • Movie6.7

    Romance on the High Seas

    1948 · 36 votes

  • Movie6.2

    That Night in Rio

    1941 · 21 votes

  • Movie6.7

    The Running Man

    1963 · 48 votes

  • Movie6.0

    Mrs. Parkington

    1944 · 20 votes

  • Movie6.4

    The Saga of Hemp Brown

    1958 · 9 votes

  • Movie6.0

    A Bell for Adano

    1945 · 14 votes

  • Movie6.2

    Fiesta

    1947 · 5 votes

  • Movie7.5

    Girl Trouble

    1942 · 3 votes

Series7

  • TV7.9

    I Love Lucy

    1951 · 264 votes

  • TV7.2

    77 Sunset Strip

    1958 · 26 votes

  • TV6.3

    December Bride

    1954 · 4 votes

  • TV7.2
  • TV6.5

    Racket Squad

    1951 · 4 votes

  • TV5.6
  • TV6.8