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 Englishlanguage films followed especially after 1940 Among his roles were Signor Matiste Susan Alexander Kanes 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