Ricardo Cortez — Why Make Him a Latin Lover? (1924) 🇺🇸
From the shipping business to acting is the prosaic path traveled by Ricardo Cortez, the “Latin lover” discovery.
But, strange to say, he was born in America and his real name isn’t Cortez.
Several years ago he left the job of shipping cargoes of this and that from his company’s wharves at an Eastern port for a precarious existence in the movies. Bits and a few small parts, with Bob Ellis [Robert Ellis] and other actors, which didn’t seem to get him anywhere at all, and two years playing juveniles with a stage stock company convinced him that the thespic realms were not destined as his habitat. So back to his desk he went.
About a year or so ago, however, he chanced to be at the Ambassador one evening during a Los Angeles visit when Jesse Lasky [Jesse L. Lasky] was impressed by his personality, his grace of manner, his dark handsomeness. A contract with. Paramount was the result. And we were told many highly interesting things concerning this new Latin lover upon whom the name of Cortez was charmingly bestowed, carrying with it, perhaps, stern admonition to live up to its implication of colorful mystery. In fact, the information broadcasted, when simmered down, proved rather vague and indefinite and left us wondering what Cortez might really be like.
In the past year he has appeared in several Paramount productions, the latest being The Next Corner, and is now slated for a featured rôle in Feet of Clay, which is to be the next C. B. De Mille [Cecil B. DeMille] picture following Triumph.
He has no fool notions about his art. Rick, as they call him about the studio, is quite a likable young fellow, shorn of that absurd Latin lover publicity. There is a distinct void on the screen which could so nicely be filled by young men of Rick’s calibre — nice, pleasant fellows who indulge in good-natured kidding, who dance and flirt divinely, and who can give to their rôles a genuinely likable personality. So why, in the name of all that is sensible don’t they strip off that veneer of foolish false publicity upon whose waves they attempt to make successes, and let young chaps like Ricardo Cortez be themselves?
He is unique among actors in one respect — he doesn’t want to be a director.
“When my youth and beauty fail me,” he grins, “I want to go into the business end of picture production. There’s where the money is. So I’m biding my time, doing my acting job the best I can — and studying the industry in all its branches. I’ll be a movie magnate yet and sit at a shiny mahogany desk and push buttons.”
Far too keen is he to admit the fabrication of that Latin lover stuff; instead, he side-steps queries with a neat wit; but there’s a twinkle in his eyes as he does so.
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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, August 1924