Fortunio Bonanova

Known for ActingBorn 1895-01-13Died 1969-04-02Palma 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.Read more

Movies & web series

The Ballad of Hector the Stowaway Dog

Poderoso caballero

My Best Gal

Girl Trouble

Double Indemnity

I Love Lucy

Citizen Kane

Jaguar

An Affair to Remember

Kiss Me Deadly

The Abbott and Costello Show

77 Sunset Strip

Larceny, Inc.

Havana Rose

The Mark of Zorro

Hit the Hay

Five Graves to Cairo

General Electric Theater

El carnaval del diablo

The Running Man

The Kneeling Goddess

Adventures of Don Juan

Romance on the High Seas

Going My Way

The Red Dragon

Racket Squad

Bad Men of Tombstone

The Saga of Hemp Brown

Rose of Santa Rosa

I Was an Adventuress

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Blood and Sand

Whirlpool

Four Jacks and a Jill

The Black Swan

Unfinished Business

Moon Over Miami

The Moon Is Blue

December Bride

That Night in Rio

Down Argentine Way

Thunder Bay

Fiesta

Don Juan Tenorio

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

Second Chance

Tropic Holiday

With This Ring