On December 14, 1944, Mexican actress Lupe Vélez was found dead in her bed wearing blue satin pajamas, with candles and flowers arranged around her. She had taken 75 pills of the barbiturate Seconal. The four-month pregnant star left behind a suicide note addressed to her boyfriend, Austrian actor Harald Ramond, that said:

To Harald,

May God forgive you and forgive me, too, but I prefer to take my life away and our baby’s, before I bring him shame or killing him. How could you, Harald, fake such great love for me and our baby when all this time you didn’t want us? I see no other way out for me, so goodbye and good luck to you.

Love, Lupe

In her short life of 36 years, Vélez had made a successful career for herself in Hollywood. She seamlessly transitioned from silent films to talkies, worked with directors like D. W. Griffith, Cecil B. deMille, Henry King, Victor Fleming, and William Wyler, and had love affairs with several Hollywood leading men. She was a devout Catholic and is speculated to have struggled with bipolar disorder, a condition not diagnosed at the time.

Unlike dramatic actresses Dolores del Rio and Katy Jurado, the other two Mexican women working in Hollywood films at the time, Vélez excelled at comedy. She was a song and dance woman, proficient in the art of comic timing, skilled at improvisation, comic asides and double-takes. Audiences loved her fiery screen persona and she was dubbed ‘whoopee Lupe,’ ‘the Mexican spitfire,’ and ‘the hot tamale.’

Unfortunately, the racism of the time confined her to the ‘ethnic’ roles she was cast in. Her biographer Michelle Vogel, in “Lupe Vélez: The Life and Career of Hollywood’s ‘Mexican Spitfire,’” recounts that her roles were actually written for her in broken English, and reporters deliberately altered her interview answers to reflect Mexican stereotypes.

Vélez was born María de Guadalupe Villalobos-Vélez in San Luis de Potosí, Mexico, to a well-to-do family on July 18, 1908. Her father was a colonel in the army and fought in the Mexican Revolution; her mother was a small-time opera singer. She was the black sheep of the family from the start and was packed off at 13 to a convent school in San Antonio, Texas to improve her behavior. When her father abandoned the family, she had to return to Mexico and started working to support the family, performing at the local theater in the evenings. In no time, her singing and dancing made her a local star, and an American producer discovered her and asked her to move to Hollywood. She came to the public’s attention in the 1927 silent comedy Sailors, Beware! with Laurel and Hardy. But her big break came in 1927 with The Gaucho opposite Douglas Fairbanks with whom she proceeded to have a steamy affair, despite the fact that he was married to Mary Pickford.

Her career gained further steam in roles like Griffith’s Lady of the Pavements in 1929, Tod Browning’s Where East is East the same year, and her first talkie, 1929’s Rin Tin Tin film Tiger Rose, now lost. She made the transition that not many other actors could because her Mexican accent and the rhythms of her speech were central to her screen identity.

She worked with deMille twice in The Squaw Man and Resurrection (both in 1931). And then she found her niche in comedies like The Half-Naked Truth (1932) and Hot Pepper (1933).

Vélez moved to New York in 1932 to perform in Flo Ziegfeld’s hit, Hot Cha, with Burt Lahr and Eleanor Powell on Broadway. Even though she returned to Hollywood and starred in a few more successful movies, RKO did not renew her contract in 1934. After a few mediocre independent films, she went back to Broadway to appear in the 1938 Cole Porter musical You Never Know which closed early. Desperate to resurrect her career, she went back to Mexico to act in her first Mexican film La Zandunga. Upon returning to the US in 1939, she reached the pinnacle of her career by headlining a series of eight B-movies – the ‘Mexican Spitfire’ series – starting with The Girl from Mexico, making history as the first Latina to do so. She played a volatile nightclub singer, Carmelita Lindsay, married to a staid American played by Donald Woods.

Her on-screen personality was difficult to separate from her turbulent personal life, and it is speculated that the studios took advantage of the scandals she persisted in making to publicize her films. She had affairs with John Gilbert, Charlie Chaplin, Victor Fleming, Errol Flynn and Clark Gable. But the one that grabbed the most attention was the affair the five-foot-nothing actress started with the 6’3” Gary Cooper when they costarred in 1929’s Wolf Song. Cooper ended the relationship when she shot him with a gun as he was boarding a train to get away from her. She had already stabbed him with a kitchen knife previously and got into a tabloid fight with his mother who did not want her for a daughter-in-law. “I think I will kill my Gary,” she told a reporter. “Because he does not get angry when Lupe is angry with him.” In “Lupe and Her Lovers” by Floyd Conner, Cooper is quoted as saying many years later, “You couldn’t help but be attracted to Lupe Vélez. She flashed, stormed, and sparked, and on the set, she was apt to throw things if she thought it would do any good. But she objected to being called wild. She’d say, ‘I am not wild! I am just Lupe.’”

Her short-lived marriage of five years to Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller was regularly splashed in the press as a lot of their fights were conducted publicly in restaurants, football games, prize fights and at premieres, and Vélez had no problem picking up the phone and calling the gossip columnists either. In Vogel’s book she is quoted as saying, “For no reason, I punch him right on the nose. He rears up and says ‘Mama, you hit me,’ and I say, ‘Darling, I am so sorry. Hit me back.’” Weissmuller would go to set covered in bite marks and scratches that makeup artists had to cover up. Once Vélez taunted him by saying she killed his dog. He retaliated by wringing the neck of her parrot, then walked out on her. He would mention later that he often had to bring her home from Cooper’s house. Vélez filed for divorce twice from Weissmuller and they reconciled each time. The third time was final in 1938 “when she told the judge that he was ‘very insulting,’ threw dishes at her and threatened to kill her chihuahua,” according to the Evening Independent.

Vélez picked feuds with actresses as well. Vogel talks about a catfight between her and actress Lilyan Tashman: “…  sarcastic, bitchy remarks flew back and forth between Lupe and Lilyan for ages. Then came the culmination of years of pent-up frustration and the feisty pair came to blows on the powder room floor in the Montmartre Cafe in Hollywood. They clawed, punched and kicked each other and by all accounts, Lupe won a clear decision.”

She once pulled a knife on Norma Shearer at a party given by Carole Lombard because she didn’t like Shearer wearing a red dress at the all-white ball. And she once socked Libby Holman, her co-star of the Broadway show You Never Know, in the face and gave her a black eye at a curtain call after a long-running feud with her. 

The ill-fated affair with Ramond started in 1944, and Vélez’s tragic end soon followed. An apocryphal tale was soon floated about her death by Kenneth Anger in his book “Hollywood Babylon,” in which he claims that Vélez was found dead in her bathroom with her head in the toilet bowl. This claim has been refuted by many biographers.

Her funeral was at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles and Weissmuller was one of the pallbearers. She was buried in Panteón Civil de Dolores Cemetery in Mexico after a second funeral where more than 4,000 mourners showed up. Vélez left behind an estate worth $125,000. Her epitaph reads “Lupita, descansa en paz. Vivirás en el corazón de todos. Recordándote con cariño tu madre, hermanos y sobrinos.” (Lupita, rest in peace. You will live in everyone’s heart. We, your mother, siblings, and nephews and nieces remember you with affection.)