Felicia Montealegre

Felicia María Cohn Montealegre was born on February 6, 1922, in San José, Costa Rica, to Roy Elwood Cohn, a United States mining executive, and Clemencia Cristina Montealegre Carazo, a Costa Rican national. She had two sisters, Nancy Alessandri and Madeline Lecaros. Among her ancestors was Mariano Montealegre Bustamante, the first vice head of state of Costa Rica. At the age of one, Montealegre relocated to Chile, where she was educated at the French School of Nuns and raised Catholic. She later converted to Judaism prior to her marriage to conductor Leonard Bernstein; her paternal grandfather had been Jewish.

Montealegre arrived in New York in 1944 at age twenty-one, where she studied piano under Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau and began acting training with Herbert Berghof at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research, later continuing with him at his newly established HB Studio. Her first New York acting appearance came in April 1945, when she performed in the English-language premiere of Federico García Lorca's If Five Years Pass at the Provincetown Playhouse. She made her Broadway debut on July 20, 1946, at the Booth Theatre, playing the ingénue in Ben Hecht's Swan Song. In 1950, she served as understudy to Leora Dana in Samuel A. Taylor's The Happy Time on Broadway, a production starring Eva Gabor and Richard Hart.

Her Broadway credits span from 1953 to 1976. In 1953, she played Jessica in a production of The Merchant of Venice at New York City Center. She returned to Broadway in 1967 to portray Birdie Hubbard in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, directed by Mike Nichols. Her final Broadway appearance came in the 1976 play Poor Murderer, directed by her former acting teacher Herbert Berghof. Beyond Broadway, her stage work included the role of Katharine in Henry V at the 1956 Cambridge Drama Festival in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Margot Wendice in Dial M for Murder at the Palm Beach Playhouse in 1957, and Sally Bowles in Van Druten's I Am a Camera at the North Jersey Playhouse alongside Michael Wager.

Beginning in 1949, Montealegre built a substantial television career, taking leading roles in weekly anthology dramas on NBC and CBS, including Kraft Television Theatre, Studio One, Suspense, The Chevrolet Tele-Theatre, and The Philco Television Playhouse. Her television debut came on May 11, 1949, on Kraft Television Theatre, where she played Hygieia in The Oath of Hippocrates alongside Dean Harens and Guy Spaull. That same year she appeared in Studio One's Flowers from a Stranger opposite Yul Brynner, and she went on to act in eleven Studio One teleplays between 1949 and 1956. Among those was Of Human Bondage, which aired November 21, 1949, in which she played Mildred opposite Charlton Heston as Philip Carey, based on the W. Somerset Maugham novel. She and Heston appeared together again in 1952 in The Wings of the Dove, based on the Henry James novel. In 1950, she took the leading role of Nora Helmer in a television adaptation of Ibsen's A Doll's House, with John Newland as Krogstad and Theodore Newton as Thorvald. She also appeared in four episodes of the CBS series Suspense between 1949 and 1954, including "The Yellow Scarf," in which she played a housekeeper opposite Boris Karloff.

Montealegre also performed dramatic and narrating roles in classical music contexts. In 1957, she narrated Lukas Foss's Parable of Death, based on a poem by Rilke, for the Syracuse Friends of Chamber Music. She performed the title role in Arthur Honegger's Joan of Arc at the Stake on multiple occasions, including a 1958 performance with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic and Leontyne Price in the role of Margaret. Leonard Bernstein composed the narration for his Symphony No. 3: Kaddish with Montealegre in mind; she narrated its American premiere on January 31, 1964, with soprano Jennie Tourel and Charles Munch conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 1973, she made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Andromache in Berlioz's Les Troyens, the work's first staging in New York City.

Montealegre was active in social and political causes throughout her life. In 1963, she became the first chair of the Women's Division of the New York Civil Liberties Union, concentrating her efforts on educational programs and fundraising. She supported Another Mother for Peace, an antiwar grassroots campaign launched on Mother's Day 1967, and was among one hundred individuals arrested at an antiwar protest in Washington, D.C., two years later. On January 14, 1970, she hosted a fundraiser at the Bernsteins' Park Avenue apartment to support the families of the Panther 21, members of the Black Panther Party who had been held for nine months without set trial dates. The event was described by Charlotte Curtis in The New York Times the following day and became the subject of Tom Wolfe's New York magazine cover story "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's," which popularized the term "radical chic." Montealegre responded with a letter to The New York Times condemning the coverage as frivolous. Leonard Bernstein's FBI file later revealed that the Bureau had fabricated letters and staged agents to provoke protests against the family in the aftermath. As vice-chairman of the Citizens' Inquiry on Parole and Criminal Justice, Inc., Montealegre co-authored a March 1974 report on the New York State parole system in collaboration with Coretta Scott King, Victor Marrero, Ramsey Clark, and others, recommending the abolishment of the New York State Board of Parole provided an alternative could be found. She also worked on behalf of Amnesty International in Chile during the political unrest of the 1970s. Following her death on June 16, 1978, Leonard Bernstein established the Felicia Montealegre Bernstein Fund of Amnesty International USA in her memory.