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.

Citizen Kane

8.0

Double Indemnity

8.1

An Affair to Remember

7.4

Kiss Me Deadly

7.2

I Love Lucy

7.9

The Mark of Zorro

7.1

For Whom the Bell Tolls

6.5

Going My Way

6.7

Five Graves to Cairo

7.0

The Black Swan

6.4

Whirlpool

6.4

Blood and Sand

6.4

The Moon Is Blue

6.3

The Fugitive

5.9

The Running Man

6.6

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

6.1

Adventures of Don Juan

6.4

Thunder Bay

6.1

Larceny, Inc.

6.9

Romance on the High Seas

6.7

Down Argentine Way

6.0

The Kneeling Goddess

6.5

Second Chance

5.9

77 Sunset Strip

6.7

A Yank in the R.A.F.

5.5

September Affair

6.1

Mrs. Parkington

6.1

That Night in Rio

6.2

Moon Over Miami

6.1

New York Confidential

5.8

A Bell for Adano

5.7

Bulldog Drummond in Africa

5.5

Death Whistles the Blues

4.7

I Was an Adventuress

6.3

Thunder in the Sun

6.0

Brazil

5.2

Conquest of Cochise

5.1

Monsieur Beaucaire

5.6

The Red Dragon

6.1

Where Do We Go from Here?

5.3

A Successful Calamity

5.2

Mr. and Mrs. North

4.5

The Saga of Hemp Brown

5.6

Man Alive

5.1

The Girl on The Roof

4.4

Pepita Jimenez

4.8

Angel on the Amazon

4.8

Tropic Holiday

5.5

So This Is Love

4.5

Careless Lady

5.2

Don Juan Tenorio

5.8

The Count of Monte Cristo

4.4

Fiesta

4.7

Nancy Goes to Rio

5.7

Four Jacks and a Jill

6.0

Bad Men of Tombstone

6.3

General Electric Theater

6.0

Racket Squad

6.0

Unfinished Business

5.3

Obliging Young Lady

5.0

La pícara Susana

5.0

December Bride

5.5

With This Ring

6.0

Girl Trouble

6.5

Dixie

3.0

Jaguar

7.0

The Sultan's Daughter

3.0

Two Latins from Manhattan

5.0

Romance in the Dark

3.0

Hit the Hay

0.0

My Best Gal

0.0

El carnaval del diablo

0.0

Havana Rose

0.0

Poderoso caballero

0.0

Pacto con el Diablo (o el socio, Mr. Davis)

0.0

The Ballad of Hector the Stowaway Dog

0.0

Las cuatro plumas

0.0