The Story Of Mexico’s First Silver Screen Starlette: Lupita Tovar

With award season around the corner, it’s time to reflect on the Latin stars of yesteryear, specifically those who may be overlooked by the annals of mainstream pop cultural history. In this story, I bring you the legend of Lupita Tovar. The Mexican film legend starred in the 1931 Spanish-language version of Dracula, which was filmed simultaneously with the famed Bela Lugosi version. She died in 2016 at 106.

Before the use of sound in films, the studios could just change the intertitles (the subtitles, except in silent movies, the texts was displayed in between, or inter live action scenes) to get the story across. But when talkies evolved, many elected to shoot new foreign-language versions of their films. For the Spanish-language Dracula (produced by Tovar’s future husband), Universal employed a different director, actors and crew to work at night on the same sets (and in the same costumes) that were used during the day for the English version of the Bram Stoker classic that made Lugosi a legend. Tovar played Eva Steward, the daughter of the sanatorium owner, who comes under Dracula’s (Carlos Villar) evil spell.

“This was very, very difficult because I always needed my sleep — 10 hours. It was a complete change because I had to sleep in the daytime,” Tovar said in Michael G. Ankerich’s 2011 book The Sound of Silence. “I was actually frightened by the sets. I would go to work about an hour early and sit there and try to concentrate. It was very dark and scary. We had our dinner at midnight. We left in the morning before the English cast came in.”

Tovar was born on July 27, 1910, in the town of Matias Romero in the southern end of Mexico. Her father was Mexican and her mother Irish. A dark-haired beauty, she excelled at gymnastics and dance in school and was offered a contract at Fox after she was spotted by Hollywood director and producer Robert J. Flaherty.

Tovar’s father didn’t want her to leave home but changed his mind in part after receiving a letter from the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles saying that it would be a great opportunity for a young woman to come to the U.S. to represent her country.

The National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in December included her Dracula on its list of “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant motion pictures.

Lupita returned to Mexico to great acclaim to star in Santa (1932), her country’s first talking film, and later appeared in The Invader (1936) opposite Buster Keaton, Blockade (1938) with Henry Fonda, South of the Border (1939) with Gene Autry and The Westerner (1940) with Gary Cooper.

She pretty much exited show business in the mid-1940s, preferring to raise a family. Lupita Tovar’s daughter is Susan Kohner, who earned an Oscar nomination for portraying the young woman who rejects her black mother (Juanita Moore) and tries to pass herself off as white in the 1959 Douglas Sirk melodrama Imitation of Life. Other survivors include her grandchildren Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz, Kohner’s sons, who shared an Oscar screenplay nomination for About a Boy (2002). Tovar was married to Czech-born producer and Hollywood agent Paul Kohner, who represented the likes of Greta Garbo, John Huston, Lana Turner, Ingmar Bergman, and Yul Brynner.

In 1982, Tovar was honored with a Mexican stamp that bore her image, and in 2001, she received the Life Achievement Award from the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Mexico.