Today is the Centennial of the Mexican American actress Movita, who was born as Maria Luisa Castaneda but renamed Movita by MGM because the name sounded Polynesian to them. Well maybe it's her centennial. She claims the studio fudged with her age to make her older for legal reasons. She's surely best remembered today as "Tehani" one of two young island beauties (the other being "Maimiti" played by Mamo Clark) that got entangled in all that Mutinous Best Picture business on the Bounty back in 1935 (if you know what I mean).
Movita went on to international fame and married two famous masculine hunks, first the boxer Jack Doyle and then superstar Marlon Brando (quite atypically she was an "older woman" marrying a young superstar) so we're guessing she had a type...
Movita with Franchot Tone & Clark Gable in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
In a strange, and one might argue ugly, coincidence Brando starred in a new version of his then-wife's starmaker Mutiny on the Bounty in 1962 and promptly dumped the original old Tehani for the young new Maimiti in the remake.
So, the logical question is: why doesn't she have a biopic? It feels like writer/directors in Hollywood are missing a lot of opportunities to tell fascinating "new" stories about cinema's old self, especially in the current climate -- stories about diversity and tokenism and the fetishizing of its few "ethnic" stars by way of repetitive types (the Latin Lover, the Exotic Woman, etcetera), and even in Movita's case Hollywood's ugly business of "replacing" last season's starlets with new models. There's a wide range of untold stories within Hollywood's favorite topic (itself). It would just take someone to actually look for them and want to tell them. This international beauty starred in movies with Gable and Wayne, owned and performed in night clubs sometimes with her boxer husband (who also sang), so it's not like her life was lacking in glamour, romance, or easily adaptable narrative themes. She nearly made it to her centennial but died about a year ago.
Movita with Brando & Debbie Reynolds in 1962
Showtune to go!
Here is Movita with, I think, Warren Hull (1903-1974) -- not sure why the video is labelled Richard Kennedy -- in the 1943 picture Paradise Isle.