Fortunio Bonanova

Also Known As: Josep Lluís Moll

Biography: 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.

Department: Acting

Place of Birth: Palma de Mallorca, Mallorca, Balearic Islands, Spain

Birthday: January 13, 1895

Deathday: April 02, 1969

Adult: No

Gender: Male

Popularity:

2.18%

Known For:

Citizen Kane
Double Indemnity
A Yank in the R.A.F.
Second Chance
An Affair to Remember
Adventures of Don Juan
Whirlpool
New York Confidential
Five Graves to Cairo
The Fugitive
Thunder Bay
Romance on the High Seas
Moon Over Miami
Down Argentine Way
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
Fiesta
The Red Dragon
Mrs. Parkington
Larceny, Inc.
The Moon Is Blue
September Affair
Nancy Goes to Rio
The Kneeling Goddess
The Saga of Hemp Brown
Tropic Holiday
Man Alive
So This Is Love
Four Jacks and a Jill
With This Ring
That Night in Rio
Hit the Hay
Where Do We Go from Here?
Bulldog Drummond in Africa
The Girl on The Roof
I Was an Adventuress
Blood and Sand
Careless Lady
Girl Trouble
Dixie
Pepita Jimenez
Angel on the Amazon
My Best Gal
Brazil
Going My Way
Jaguar
The Sultan's Daughter
The Mark of Zorro
For Whom the Bell Tolls
A Successful Calamity
Bad Men of Tombstone
Conquest of Cochise
Thunder in the Sun
Don Juan Tenorio
El carnaval del diablo
Unfinished Business
Obliging Young Lady
Two Latins from Manhattan
La pícara Susana
Romance in the Dark
Havana Rose
Poderoso caballero
A Bell for Adano
Kiss Me Deadly
Death Whistles the Blues
Mr. and Mrs. North
The Running Man
The Black Swan
Pacto con el Diablo (o el socio, Mr. Davis)
The Ballad of Hector the Stowaway Dog
Las cuatro plumas
Monsieur Beaucaire