Fortunio Bonanova

Fortunio Bonanova (74)

1895-01-13 - 1969-04-02 | 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.

On Movies

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

Movies as Director

NextFilm 2025