Ivonne Coll

Ivonne Coll Mendoza, born on June 18, 1947, in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, is a Puerto Rican actress and former beauty pageant titleholder whose career has spanned stage, film, and television across more than five decades. She was crowned Miss Puerto Rico in 1967, representing Fajardo, and went on to compete in the Miss Universe 1967 pageant. She remained the only representative from Fajardo to hold the national title until Ashley Cariño won in 2022.

Coll grew up in Fajardo before relocating with her family to San Juan at age ten, settling in the Río Piedras and Hato Rey municipalities. Her mother, Rosita Mendoza, was a hairstylist of note in Puerto Rico. Coll graduated as an honor student from Nuestra Señora del Pilar school and subsequently studied Social Sciences at the University of Puerto Rico. She began her professional life as a fashion model and later hosted her own television program, Una chica llamada Ivonne Coll, which aired on Puerto Rico's channel 11 from 1971 to 1975 after the channel's owner, Rafael Perez Perry, recruited her to front the show.

In 1976, Coll relocated to Los Angeles, where she studied dance and singing at the Academy of Stage and Cinema Arts and appeared in the theater production Burning Beach at the American Place Theater. She moved to New York in 1979, where she took part in Off-Broadway productions including Spain 1980, As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth. Her Broadway career ran from 1980 to 1995 and encompassed productions of Romeo + Juliet, Macbeth, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, As You Like It, and Goodbye Fidel. During her time in New York, director Francis Ford Coppola cast her as Yolanda, a Havana nightclub singer, in The Godfather Part II, where she was credited as Yvonne Coll.

Coll's stage work extended beyond Broadway to include Orinoco, for which she received an ACE Award for best actress, as well as The Masses Are Asses by Pedro Pietri, Medio Comuñas, Goodbye Castro, and Pancho Diablo, the latter featuring Fernando Allende and Sully Diaz. She continued her acting studies during this period at the HB Studio and Lee Strasberg's Acting Studio. In 1989, she appeared in the film Lean on Me, directed by John G. Avildsen and written by Michael Schiffer, playing a teacher named Mrs. Santos alongside Morgan Freeman. Her television credits from this era include L.A. Law, NYPD Blue, Chicago Hope, The Bold and the Beautiful, Pacific Blue, Crisis Center, An American Family, and Malibu Shores.

Following a return to Puerto Rico, Coll appeared in La verdadera historia de Pedro Navaja, Paper Flowers, the locally produced film La gran Fiesta, the television show Cuqui, and the 2002 film Besos de Fuego. In October 2006, she took on the title role in Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage at the Berkeley Repertory Theater in Berkeley, California. From 2011 to 2014, she held recurring roles on Switched at Birth, Glee, and Teen Wolf. Beginning in the fall of 2014, Coll joined the main cast of the CW comedy-drama Jane the Virgin, portraying Alba Villanueva, the grandmother of the title character, a role she held through 2019. In 2015, the organizers of the National Puerto Rican Day Parade honored her with a lifetime achievement award. Coll has never married and has no children, and in 2019 she returned permanently to Puerto Rico.