José Ferrer

• Born: January 8, 1912
• Birthplace: Santurce, Puerto Rico
• Died: January 26, 1992
• Place of death: Coral Gables, Florida

Puerto Rican-born actor, director, and producer

In a long and varied career as an actor, director, and producer in the theater, films, and television, Ferrer won an Academy Award and three Tonys and distinguished himself as a versatile performer with a distinctive voice.

Areas of achievement: Theater; acting; filmmaking; radio and television

Early Life

José Vicente Ferrer de Otero y Cintrón (fur-REHR) was born on January 8, 1912, in Santurce, Puerto Rico, to Rafael Ferrer, an attorney and writer, and Maria Providencia Cintrón. Both parents were originally from Spain. Ferrer first visited the mainland United States as a young boy to have an operation on his palate, and the family moved to New York City permanently when he was six.

Ferrer attended private and public schools in New York and was accepted to Princeton University when he was fourteen, but the university persuaded him to spend a year of preparation at a school in Switzerland. At the time he was a promising pianist and was expected to become a concert performer. Instead, he studied architecture.

Ferrer’s goals changed when the president of the Triangle Club, a fellow architecture student, suggested he try out for one of the dramatic club’s productions. He did and was rejected but won the leading role on his second audition. Ferrer participated in several campus productions along with fellow students such as future film star James Stewart and Josh Logan, who became a prominent stage and film director. He also organized a band, the Pied Pipers, which performed at Princeton parties.

After graduating from Princeton, Ferrer intended to work on a Ph.D. in Romance languages at Columbia University but could not resist the call of show business. He worked briefly on a showboat on Long Island Sound in 1935 and then joined Logan for a season of summer stock as a stage manager. He made his Broadway debut later that year as second policeman in A Slight Case of Murder (1935). Ferrer found steady Broadway work as an assistant stage manager and had supporting roles in eight more plays before landing the lead in Charley’s Aunt (1892) in 1940. As a young actor, he was greatly influenced by John Barrymore, Alfred Lunt, Osgood Perkins, Laurence Olivier, Paul Muni (with whom he appeared in 1939’s Key Largo), and especially Louis Jouvet, for whom Ferrer acted as interpreter on one of the French star’s visits to New York.

Life’s Work

Ferrer made his debut as a Broadway director in 1942 with the farce Vickie, in which he also starred along with his first wife, Uta Hagen, whom he married in 1938. Ferrer replaced Danny Kaye in Let’s Face It (1941) in 1943 and costarred later that year with Hagen and Paul Robeson in a legendary production of William Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice (pr. 1604, rev. 1623). After directing Mel Ferrer (no relation) in Strange Fruit in 1945, Ferrer landed the role with which he is most associated in 1946, starring in Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) under the direction of Mel Ferrer. After divorcing Hagen in 1948, he married Phyllis Hill, one of his Cyrano de Bergerac costars later that year.

Ferrer made his film debut as the dauphin in Victor Fleming’s Joan of Arc (1948) opposite Ingrid Bergman. In Otto Preminger’s stylish psychological thriller Whirlpool (1949), Ferrer’s murderous con man is distinctive because of the way the actor suggested the character’s pleasure in his villainy. In 1950, he played a South American dictator opposite Cary Grant’s idealistic doctor in Crisis and then repeated his signature role in the film of Cyrano de Bergerac. On Broadway, he directed and costarred with Gloria Swanson in a 1950 revival of the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur comedy Twentieth Century (1934) and followed it by directing the hit World War II comedy Stalag 17 (1951).

In 1952, Ferrer had another of his best-known film roles as Henri de Toulouse Lautrec in John Huston’s Moulin Rouge, playing the diminutive artist on his knees. The following year he costarred with Rita Hayworth in Miss Sadie Thompson; back on Broadway, he starred in a production of Shakespeare’s Richard III (pr. c. 1592-1593, rev. 1623) and a revival of Charley’s Aunt that he also directed and won two Tonys for directing and starring as a victimized husband in The Shrike. Continuing to perform in big Hollywood productions, Ferrer played the defense attorney in The Caine Mutiny (1954) and starred as composer Sigmund Romberg in Stanley Donen’s Deep in My Heart (1954).

In 1953, Ferrer achieved another level of celebrity by marrying popular singer-actor Rosemary Clooney. The couple had five children, including future character actor Miguel Ferrer, before divorcing in 1961. They remarried in 1964 and divorced again in 1967. The Ferrers were one the most prominent show business couples of their time, appearing on countless magazine covers and making several recordings and television appearances together.

The Shrike (1955), based on his stage success, was the first film directed by Ferrer, and he began concentrating on this side of his career, directing five films from 1955 to 1958. He had one final Broadway success, directing the Civil War drama The Andersonville Trial (1959).

For the rest of his career Ferrer alternated between film and television work, with occasional forays in the theater. He made one of his most indelible film impressions in David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962), as a sadistic Turkish officer during World War I who has T. E. Lawrence, disguised as an Arab, tortured. The brutality of the scene resulted in the banning of the film in Turkey.

His other notable film roles include Ship of Fools (1965), Enter Laughing (1967), Billy Wilder’s Fedora (1978), Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), and David Lynch’s Dune (1984). His final Broadway performances came as a temporary replacement in the musical Man of La Mancha (1965) in 1966, and his final directorial effort was another musical, Carmelina (1979). Ferrer also acted and directed in London, his native Puerto Rico, and regional theaters, sang opera with the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Beverly Hills Opera, and served as artistic adviser for Miami’s Coconut Grove Playhouse. He was planning a return to Broadway when he died of colon cancer on January 26, 1992.

Significance

Ferrer’s trademark was his deep, resonant voice. He also articulated his lines more distinctly than most actors, especially the method actors of the second half of the twentieth century, without seeming artificial or stagey. Late in his career, Ferrer’s unique voice helped him launch a new career as a voiceover actor. Ferrer acted in twenty-seven Broadway plays and directed twenty-one. He acted in forty-nine films and directed seven. In addition to winning three Tonys and one Academy Award, he was nominated for Oscars for Joan of Arc and Moulin Rouge. He was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 1981 and received the National Medal of Arts in 1985, becoming the first actor to receive the award. Ferrer was the first Latino actor to win a Tony, the first to win an Academy Award, and the first to direct a Hollywood film.

Bibliography

Buckley, Michael. “José Ferrer.” Films in Review 38 (1987): 66-75, 130-145. Detailed description of Ferrer’s film career.

Clooney, Rosemary, and Joan Barthel. Girl Singer: An Autobiography. New York: Broadway Books, 2001. Clooney discusses her often turbulent two marriages to Ferrer.

Ferrer, José. “José Ferrer.” Interview by Lewis Funke and John E. Booth In Actors Talk about Acting, edited by Lewis Funke and John E. Booth. New York: Avon, 1961. Lengthy interview with Ferrer in which he discusses his domestic life and his films but primarily talks about his stage experience and his theories of the theater.