Chapter 1 - Screen Icon, Stardom, and the Invention of La Doña

Summary

María Félix was a star with a distinct performance style on screen and off. In interviews she was full of extravagant assertions that suggested intimacy, yet she was deeply private about many aspects of her life. She lived a life of creativity, display, and acquisition informed by a sense of professionalism in her work and flamboyance in her public appearances. For these reasons she was perceived to be a diva. As I explore in the Introduction, Félix, the popular press, her contemporaries, and her fans have all contributed to the mythology surrounding her. Stars who attain notoriety that exceeds any status attributed to their work are particularly prone to such mythification and the subsequent iconic status associated with it. Over the course of her life, she was as much a star as a celebrity. This chapter will explore theoretical concepts related to stardom and celebrity as they apply to Félix. In order to understand her as a star, it will take as a case study the adaptation, Doña Bárbara (Fernando de Fuentes, 1943), a film so tied to her iconic persona that it resulted in a lifelong nickname, ‘La Doña’. Not only was it a ‘memorably iconic performance as a woman capable of paradoxically fusing feminine beauty and masculine power’, it was also one that had clear racial dynamics that reflected the prejudices of the author, Rómulo Gallegos, and the prevailing attitudes of the Mexican film industry and wider culture. I will explore how Félix challenges fixed ideas about gender through a close look at her performance and wardrobe and examine how her whiteness is an overlooked marker of race that simultaneously complicates and undermines some of the racist intent of the source text and reinforces the racial stratification of the film.

Given its valence and significance over Félix's lifetime, it is worth pausing on the nickname ‘La Doña’. It can literally be translated as ‘Mrs’, it is also a deferential term that denotes authority and one that is usually given to an older woman. Félix was only twenty-nine when she took on this role. Her performance as Doña Bárbara, as well as her subsequent roles, combined with her off-screen persona meant that she imbued the word ‘la Doña’ with an embodied intelligence and strength of personality that rendered the word uniquely hers.