Ramon Novarro

Ramon Novarro, born Ramón Gil Samaniego on February 6, 1899, in Durango City, Durango, Mexico, was an actor whose career spanned silent film, talking pictures, television, and the Broadway stage. His father, Dr. Mariano N. Samaniego, was a dentist who had earned his degree from the University of Pennsylvania before establishing a practice in Durango, where he married Leonor Pérez Gavilán in 1891. The couple had thirteen children, among them Ramón. Three of his sisters, Guadalupe, Rosa, and Leonor, entered religious life as nuns. Novarro was a second cousin of Mexican actresses Dolores del Río and Andrea Palma. The family fled Durango during the Mexican Revolution, eventually settling in Los Angeles in 1913.

Novarro entered the film industry in 1917, taking on small parts while supporting himself through work as a singing waiter, a taxi dancer, and a performer in dance revues choreographed by Ernest Belcher. Actor and director Rex Ingram and his wife, actress Alice Terry, became early advocates for Novarro, promoting him as a rival to Rudolph Valentino and suggesting he adopt the professional name Novarro. His role in Scaramouche in 1923 marked his first significant success, and his performance in Ben-Hur in 1925 elevated him into the upper tier of Hollywood stardom. At the height of his popularity in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he was earning more than one hundred thousand dollars per film. He appeared opposite Norma Shearer in The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg in 1927 and with Joan Crawford in Across to Singapore in 1928. Following Valentino's death in 1926, Novarro became the screen's foremost Latin actor, and MGM promoted him as a Latin lover and sex symbol.

His transition to sound film began with Devil-May-Care in 1929, in which he played a singing French soldier. Subsequent talking pictures included The Pagan with Dorothy Janis, Mata Hari opposite Greta Garbo in 1931, The Barbarian with Myrna Loy in 1933, and Laughing Boy alongside Lupe Vélez in 1934. When MGM declined to renew his contract upon its expiration in 1935, Novarro continued working in film and other media, appearing in productions for Republic Pictures as well as a Mexican religious drama and a French comedy. In January 1936, he performed a song and dance act with his sister Carmen for a week at the Birmingham Hippodrome in England. During the 1940s he took smaller film roles, including a part in John Huston's We Were Strangers in 1949, which starred Jennifer Jones and John Garfield. He remained active in television into the late 1960s, with an appearance on NBC's The High Chaparral as late as 1968. A Broadway tryout was pursued in the 1960s but was ultimately aborted. His verified Broadway credit is the drama Infidel Caesar.

Novarro invested earnings from his peak years in real estate. His Hollywood Hills home, the Samuel-Novarro House, was designed in 1927 by Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright, and stands as one of the architect's notable works. In 1925, he also purchased a residence in the West Adams district of Los Angeles for twelve thousand dollars, spending an additional one hundred thousand dollars on renovations.

His personal life was marked by the tension between his Roman Catholic faith and his homosexuality, a conflict to which his lifelong alcoholism has been attributed. In the early 1920s he had a romantic relationship with composer Harry Partch, who was then working as an usher at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He later became romantically involved with Hollywood journalist and publicist Herbert Howe in the late 1920s, and with San Francisco philanthropist and arts patron Noël Sullivan.

Novarro was murdered on October 30, 1968, at his Laurel Canyon home by brothers Paul and Tom Ferguson, aged 22 and 17 respectively. The prosecution in the subsequent murder case alleged that the two men tortured Novarro over several hours in the belief that a large sum of money was concealed in the house. He died of asphyxiation after being beaten. The brothers were convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms but were released on parole in the mid-1970s, after which both were re-arrested for unrelated offenses and served longer sentences than they had for Novarro's murder. Paul Ferguson acknowledged responsibility for Novarro's death in a 1998 interview. Tom Ferguson died by suicide on March 6, 2005, and Paul Ferguson was killed by a fellow inmate in 2018 while serving a sixty-year sentence for rape in Missouri. Novarro is buried at Calvary Cemetery in East Los Angeles, and his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is located at 6350 Hollywood Boulevard.