Emilio Fernandez Biography

QUICK FACTS
Activities Actor , Director , Screenwriter more
Nationality Mexico
Birth March 26, 1904
Death August 6, 1986
BIOGRAPHY

Film director, producer, screenwriter and actor, Emilio “El Indio” Fernández Romo, was born on March 26, 1904 in Mineral del Hondo, Coahuila, Mexico. He was a great personality from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, his father was a revolutionary general and his mother a Kikapú Indian.

He studied at the Military Academy and joined the Revolution. In 1923 he had to leave the country to participate in a frustrated uprising against Álvaro Obregón. He lived in the United States, where he worked as a film double. In 1928 he posed for the design of the Oscar statuette, an award given by the Academy to the best in cinema.

He returned to Mexico and participated in films such as Cruz Diablo, Allá en el Rancho Grande and Janitzio. In 1941 he debuted as a director in the film La Isla de la Pasión with which he made his debut as a director and, for reasons of said project, he traveled to Cuba, where he met who would be his first wife, Gladys Fernández, mother of the his daughter Adela.

He worked with great personalities from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema such as Dolores del Río and Pedro Armendáriz. He participated in films such as Wildflower, María Candelaria, La perla, Enamorada, Río Escondido, La malquerida and Pueblerina. In 1950, he filmed his only Hollywood film, The Torch. Little by little he began to have fewer opportunities to direct so around the 60s he returned to working as an actor. At the end of the 70s, he was imprisoned in Torreón, after being found guilty of the death of a farmer. The last years of his life were spent in his house in Coyoacán, alone and selling what he grew in his garden to survive.

He died in Mexico City, on August 6, 1986, of a heart attack.