Raquel Torres

Raquel Torres, born November 11, 1908, in Hermosillo, Mexico, and died August 10, 1987, in Malibu, California, was a Mexican-born American film actress and Broadway performer. Her birth name was recorded as either Paula Marie Osterman or Wilhelmina von Osterman. Her father was a German emigrant and her mother was Mexican. Following her mother's early death, the family relocated to the United States, where Torres spent most of her life. She adopted her mother's maiden surname and performed with a fabricated accent, choices made to align with Hollywood's prevailing conception of Latin identity. Her sister was actress Renee Torres.

Torres entered film in 1928 when she was cast as a Polynesian beauty in White Shadows in the South Seas, a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer silent film shot on location in Tahiti. The production was MGM's first feature to be fully synchronized with music and sound effects, and Torres secured the role after 300 other applicants had been turned down. She also became the first person to have her voice recorded as part of a new system developed for selecting motion picture talent. The following year she appeared in two films. The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929), in which she received third billing behind Lili Damita and Ernest Torrence, was the first film adaptation of Thornton Wilder's novel and won the Academy Award for Art Direction. Her second 1929 release, The Desert Rider, was a western opposite cowboy star Tim McCoy.

Torres continued working in tropical-themed productions with The Sea Bat (1930) and Aloha (1931), taking on roles as island women and biracial characters. In 1931 she also performed in a vaudeville act in New York. Her Broadway credit came in 1932, when she played the role of Teresa in Adam Had Two Sons. In 1933, her final year of film work, she appeared alongside the comedy team of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey in So This Is Africa and with the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, in which Groucho Marx delivered a well-known comic line directed at her character.

Torres met New York stockbroker Stephen Ames at a Hollywood party in 1934, at a time when Ames was still married to actress Adrienne Ames. Torres had been escorted to the party by film agent Charles K. Feldman and had withdrawn to a quiet corner due to a cold. Ames approached her and the two spoke. They encountered each other again in New York a year later, after Ames had divorced and Torres had not proceeded with an anticipated marriage of her own. Ames proposed to Torres at the Colony Club while they were dancing, and she accepted when he telephoned her the following day. He gave her a Rolls-Royce as a gift, and they married two weeks later. The couple spent time in New York and Florida before purchasing an option on two and a half acres of land in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, where they planned to build a home. Torres retired from the film industry following the marriage and did not return to it even after her husband began producing postwar films. Ames died in 1955.

In 1959, Torres married actor Jon Hall, known for his roles in South Sea adventure films of the 1930s and 1940s. The marriage ended in divorce. In October 1985, wind-carried embers from a Malibu fire ignited the roof of Torres' single-story home at 22350 Pacific Coast Highway in the Las Flores Canyon area, destroying approximately 80 percent of the structure. Torres escaped unharmed, assisted by firefighters. She died of a heart attack on August 10, 1987, in Malibu, at the age of 78.