Fortunio Bonanova
Personal Info
Known For Actor
Gender Male
Birthday 1895-01-13
Deathday 1969-04-02 (74 years old)
Place of Birth Palma de Mallorca, Mallorca, Balearic Islands, Spain
Also Known As Josep Lluís Moll
Fortunio Bonanova
Biography
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.
Known For
Actor
as Comisario Fenton
as Inspector
as Spanish Bank Manager
as Fernando Christophe
as Serge Bolanos
as Santos
as Courbet
as Francisco Servente
as Carmen Trivago
as Senor
as TV host
as Mexican Minister
as Mandy, hotel owner
as Dr. Marafioti
as Television Performer
as Sheriff Antoine Chighizola
as Ambassador DeMarco
as Professor
as Grazzi
as Ricardo Domingos
as Feruccio di Ravallo
as John Mingo
as Don Serafino Lopez
as Sebastian Ortega
as Plinio
as The Governor's Cousin
as Nacho Gutiérrez
as Antonio Morales
as Don Carlos
as Don Pedro Vargas
as Mario Alvini
as Prof. Zorado
as Insp. Luis Carvero
as Gargano - Chief of Police
as Christopher Columbus
as Senor Renaldo Da Silva
as Signor Cellini
as Sam Garlopis
as Charlie
as Old Baba
as Tomaso Bozanni
as Kuda
as Fernando
as Waiter
as Gen. Sebastiano
as Don Miguel (uncredited)
as Simon Cordoba
as Anton Copoulos
as Chef
as Mike - Nightclub Owner (uncredited)
as Buano
as Armando Rivero
as Louie - Headwaiter
as Impresario
as Mr. Pretto, the Hotel Manager
as Pedro Espinosa
as Signor Matiste
as Pereira, the Headwaiter
as Sentry (uncredited)
as Hotel Manager
as Orchestra Leader
as African Police Corporal
as Barrera
as Tenor
as Pietro Rafaelo
as Rodriguez
as Don Juan Tenorio
Director
as Director
as Director
Writer
as Adaptation
Editor
as Editor