
Negrete, who would be her third husband, filming ''The Rock of the Spirits.'' Their 1952 wedding was a national event, but the marriage was shortlived. ''He threw himself on me like misery throws itself on the poor,'' Ms. One, in which he dressed her in a sheer white gown revealing her silky figure, he titled ''Very Bad.'' A photo of the two at the time shows him, fat and froglike, embracing her as she, looking cool and gorgeous, stares away in bemused boredom. The artist Diego Rivera became so obsessed that he dedicated an entire period to painting her portraits. Lara was only one of dozens of eminent men who fell in love with Ms. They divorced in 1947, and she traveled to Spain to film her first European movie, ''Mare Nostrum,'' in which she played a Latin Mata Hari. The marriage was to Mexicans what Marilyn Monroe's marriage to Joe DiMaggio was to Americans.īut the marriage began to chafe under Mr. Félix a song, ''María Bonita,'' or ''Pretty Maria,'' which became fabulously popular. Lara, Mexico's national musician-poet, a sensational union that drove newspapers wild, especially after Mr. Félix's mythic stature was a romantic life that brought marriage or liaison with many leading men of her era and courtship by numerous powerful but eventually disappointed pretenders. ''Instead, she worked out a highly personal way of moving and talking.''Īdding to Ms. ''She was never interested in a realistic style of acting,'' said Manuel Puig, the Argentine author, in 1990.
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Félix never studied acting in any formal sense, but improvised her own approach to movie parts and to the cameraman's lens. The occupying general, who falls in love with her, was played by Pedro Armendáriz, a dashing Mexican star. Félix played the daughter of a wealthy patriarch in a Mexican town seized by revolutionary troops. ''Enamorada,'' filmed in 1946, was the first of several in which she was teamed with the director Emilio Fernández and the cameraman Gabriel Figueroa, and which critics have judged her best work. Félix filmed 19 movies that include her classic portrayals. In the years that remained in the decade, Ms. She had a lofty bearing that stood in complete contrast to the traditionally submissive Mexican actress.'' ''This was the appearance of a personality who had nothing to do with the rest of Mexican cinema,'' Mr. Félix is shot and hurled from the top of a tall pine. Félix became unhappy, and after a brief affair with a college student, obtained a divorce.Īfter she moved to Mexico City, a minor film director, Fernando Palacios, saw her on the street, persuaded her to consider acting, and helped her obtain her first part, in the 1942 film ''El Peñón de las Ánimas,'' or ''The Rock of the Spirits,'' a rural melodrama modeled loosely on ''Romeo and Juliet.'' Critics have lampooned the movie over the years for its histrionics in its climactic scene, Ms. Her only son, Enrique Álvarez Félix, was born in 1934 when she was not quite 20. Enrique Álvarez, a traveling salesman proposed to her after demonstrating his Max Factor cosmetics to her, and she agreed to marry him. But she made it to the university, where she was elected Queen of the Carnival. Félix was about 10, her family moved to Guadalajara, where she was expelled from several schools. Her mother, Josefina Guereña, bore 16 children, of which 12 survived.

Félix described him in 1993 interviews with Enrique Krauze, the Mexican historian, as a classic macho who hid his emotions, beat his sons and ignored his daughters.

Her father, Bernardo Félix, was a merchant turned civil servant and an imperious dictator over his middle-class household. She did not speak English and never accepted work in Hollywood, where directors offered her only stereotyped parts as a Latin spitfire.

She was cast so often as a notorious or strong-minded woman that those characteristics became indistinguishable from her own tempestuous personality in the minds of many fans, especially after the success of early films with titles like ''Woman Without a Soul.'' Félix made films in Mexico, Spain, Italy, France and Argentina, portraying figures like a belly dancer, a brothel keeper, a teacher, a soldier, a cabaret singer and a man-eating Roman empress.

During the entire period, she reigned as the supreme goddess of Spanish-language cinema. Félix made 47 films during a tumultuous film career that began with overnight stardom in the early 1940's and raged on for three decades. María Félix, the Mexican film star whose extraordinary beauty and force of personality made her a living myth to Mexicans and a symbol of glamour and sophistication to fans throughout the world, died yesterday at her home in Mexico City.
