5 Classic Movies Starring Dolores del Rio, Mexico’s First Hollywood Star

Born María de los Dolores Asúnsolo López-Negrete at the turn of the century (that’d be the twentieth century), Mexican actress Dolores del Río was one of the very first silver screen icons. Having started in silent film — often dubbed the female Rudolph Valentino — she seamlessly made the move to the talkies and later still returned to her home country where she worked in Golden Age Mexican classics. Remembered as one of the most beautiful faces to ever grace the silver screen, she worked for over five decades. She made her screen debut in 1925’s Joanna while her final screen credit was 1978’s The Children of Sanchez, where she starred opposite Anthony Quinn and Lupita Ferrer. Crossing over from the U.S. to Mexico (and at point being denied entry back to America due to her apparent sympathies with communists like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera), del Río remains a fascinating figure of Mexican and American cinema.

In her lifetime, she worked with the likes of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, Elvis Presley, Orson Welles, Henry Fonda, and Pedro Armendáriz. With such a varied career, there are endless films we could point you to if you wanted to have a del Río primer. And to boil our choices down to merely 5 performances was no easy feat, particularly when we wanted to make sure you could screen these from the comfort of your own home. (Yes, this is a PSA to make sure we can soon get films like Maria Candelaria (1944) and Journey Into Fear (1943) on streaming sites across the web!). And so, find below five representative roles that give you a sense of why del Río was the first crossover Latin American actress in Hollywood.