The Invention of Dolores del Ro

About this book

Dolores del Ro first came to Hollywood from Mexico in 1925 and within a year had become an international star for her role in Raoul Walshs 1926 film What Price Glory. She would go on to work with Hollywoods top directors including John Ford and King Vidor and star opposite such leading men as Henry Fonda Fred Astaire Orson Welles (with whom she had a scandalous affair) and Elvis Presley. Voted by Photoplay magazine in 1933 as having "the most perfect feminine figure in Hollywood " del Ro was billed as one of cinemas most "exotic" and "aristocratic" beauties. This image-carefully crafted by her producers her studio publicists and by del Ro herself-reveals many fascinating insights into Hollywoods evolving attitudes toward race and femininity. In The Invention of Dolores del Ro Joanne Hershfield explores the intersection of ethnicity gender and stardom in American popular culture through the lens of del Ros successful and unusually lengthy career which lasted until the 1960s. Hershfield offers close readings of del Ros filmsdiscussing in detail the roles she played her costumes and makeup the music and mise-en-scne advertising publicity and reviewsthat provide a nuanced understanding of how Hollywood constructed del Ro as an exotic commodity and blunted the inherent challenge her sexual and ethnic image posed to both prevailing standards of white femininity and widespread injunctions against miscegenation. Throughout this astute and imaginative case study Hershfield looks at del Ros Hollywood films in relation to shifting ideologies about nationality gender and race between the 1920s and 1960s offering an important contribution to the debate surrounding Hollywoods ability to both reflect the nations racial and sexual obsessions and influence its perceptions about ethnic and gender identity.