Patricia Medina

Patricia Paz Maria Medina was a British actress born on 19 July 1919 in Liverpool, England. Her father, Laureano Ramón Medina Nebot, was a Spanish lawyer and opera singer originally from the Canary Islands, and her mother, Edith May Strode, was English. Medina grew up alongside two sisters, Pepita and Gloria, at a mansion in Stanmore. She began acting as a teenager in the late 1930s and worked her way into leading roles by the mid-1940s, at which point she relocated from London to Hollywood.

Among her most recognized film appearances are Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954) and Mr. Arkadin (1955), the latter directed by Orson Welles and based on episodes of the radio series The Adventures of Harry Lime, which itself derived from The Third Man. She was frequently cast in period melodramas, including The Black Knight and William Witney's Stranger at My Door. In 1950, she appeared opposite British actor Louis Hayward in Fortunes of Captain Blood, and the two subsequently co-starred in The Lady and the Bandit (1951), Lady in the Iron Mask, and Captain Pirate (1952). Though her film output was substantial in the early 1950s, her screen career had diminished considerably by the decade's end. She returned to feature films in 1968 with The Killing of Sister George, Robert Aldrich's adaptation of the lesbian-themed stage drama of the same name.

Television provided Medina with consistent work across multiple genres and networks. In 1958, she appeared in four episodes of Walt Disney's ABC series Zorro as Margarita Cortazar, and that same year played Diana Coulter in the CBS Western Have Gun – Will Travel. She also appeared in an episode of the NBC Western series Riverboat. In 1960, she was cast as different characters in two episodes of the ABC Western series The Rebel, and guest starred in the Bonanza episode "The Spanish Grant," which aired on 6 February 1960. Her Rawhide appearances included the role of Ilona Calvin in "Incident at Jacob's Well" in 1959 and Ruthanne Harper in "Incident of the Boomerang" in 1961. Additional television credits include Perry Mason ("The Case of the Lucky Loser," 27 September 1958), Thriller ("The Premature Burial," 1961), The Alfred Hitchcock Hour ("See the Monkey Dance," 9 November 1964), The Man from U.N.C.L.E. ("The Foxes and Hounds Affair," 8 October 1965), and a 1966 episode of Branded titled "Yellow for Courage."

Medina made her Broadway appearance in 1962 in Calculated Risk, adding a stage credit to a career that had been built primarily in film and television.

In her personal life, Medina married British actor Richard Greene on 24 December 1941 at St. James's Church, Spanish Place, London; the marriage ended in divorce in 1951. On 20 October 1960, she married actor Joseph Cotten at the Beverly Hills home of David O. Selznick and Jennifer Jones. Medina and Cotten resided in a historic 1935 home in the Mesa neighborhood of Palm Springs, California, from 1985 to 1992. No children were born from either marriage. In 1998, Medina published an autobiography titled Laid Back in Hollywood.

Medina died on 28 April 2012, at the age of 92, from natural causes at the Barlow Respiratory Hospital in Los Angeles, California. She was interred at Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia, beside her husband Cotten.