Fortunio Bonanova

Fortunio Bonanova

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.

Acting

1964

1963

The Running Man
Movie

Spanish Bank Manager

1959

Thunder in the Sun
Movie

Fernando Christophe

1956

Jaguar
Movie

Francisco Servente

1955

Kiss Me Deadly
Movie

Carmen Trivago

1954

1953

Conquest of Cochise
Movie

Mexican Minister

1953

Second Chance
Movie

Mandy, hotel owner

1953

1953

The Moon Is Blue
Movie

Television Performer

1953

Thunder Bay
Movie

Sheriff Antoine Chighizola

1951

I Love Lucy
Tv

Professor

1950

Nancy Goes to Rio
Movie

Ricardo Domingos

1950

Whirlpool
Movie

Feruccio di Ravallo

1948

Adventures of Don Juan
Movie

Don Serafino Lopez

1947

Rose of Santa Rosa
Movie

Don Manuel Ortega

1947

The Fugitive
Movie

The Governor's Cousin

1947

Fiesta
Movie

Antonio Morales

1945

A Bell for Adano
Movie

Gargano - Chief of Police

1945

Where Do We Go from Here?
Movie

Christopher Columbus

1944

Brazil
Movie

Senor Renaldo Da Silva

1944

Mrs. Parkington
Movie

Signor Cellini

1944

1944

1944

Going My Way
Movie

Tomaso Bozanni

1943

1943

1942

The Black Swan
Movie

Don Miguel (uncredited)

1942

Larceny, Inc.
Movie

Anton Copoulos

1941

A Yank in the R.A.F.
Movie

Louie - Headwaiter

1941

Blood and Sand
Movie

Pedro Espinosa

1941

Citizen Kane
Movie

Signor Matiste

1941

That Night in Rio
Movie

Pereira, the Headwaiter

1940

The Mark of Zorro
Movie

Sentry (uncredited)

1940

1940

1932

Infos

Full Name
Fortunio Bonanova
Gender
Male
Date of Birth
1/13/1895
Date of Death
4/2/1969
Also Known As

Josep Lluís Moll