Raul Roulien

Biography

The Latino singer and actor Raul Roulien worked briefly in Hollywood in the waning days of the American movies' embrace of the "Latin Lover" (a title invented for the Italian actor Rudolph Valentino). This phenomenon encouraged the Jewish-American actor Jacob Krantz to change his name to Ricardo Cortez. Raul began recording in 1928 and grew in reputation as a theater actor and composer as well. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1931 and became an actor, signing with 20th Century-Fox and making his movie debut in a Spanish-language version of Charlie Chan Carries On (1931), called Eran trece (1931). (Before Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Douglas Shearer and other sound technicians at the Hollywood studios perfected dubbing, foreign language versions of films had to be shot for the export market.) He sang the Gershwin song "Delishious" for his second movie Delicious (1931), but earned more attention appearing in the first Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers cinematic pairing Flying Down to Rio (1933) as part of a romantic triangle with Gene Raymond and Dolores Del Río and for his singing of "Orchids in the Moonlight". He was married four times. Following his 1920s marriage/divorce to actress Abigail Maia, he married actress/dancer Tosca Izabel Querze (1909-1933), who died in a car accident on September 27, 1933 (it is rumored that John Huston, the future Oscar-winning director and screenwriter, had struck her down while driving drunk, and the tragedy hushed up by MGM's Louis B. Mayer as a favor to Huston's father, the great stage and film actor Walter Huston). Whatever the truth, after finishing John Ford's The World Moves On (1934), he returned to Brazil where he continued to act throughout the 1930s. He married third wife actress Conchita Montenegro in 1935 but they later divorced. When he ceased acting in 1938, he continued sporadically on television as a director from 1950 to 1970 and hosted TV programs as well as working for newspapers as a writer. He was married to his fourth wife, Valkyrie de Almeida, when he died of pneumonia in São Paulo, Brazil on September 8, 2000, a month before his 95th birthday.