Conchita Montenegro and the Spanish press: from national pride to nationalist melodrama

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Spanish press reported on Conchita Montenegro, a Spanish actress who moved to Hollywood in the early 1930s, with ambiguous and contradictory messages. On the one hand, her stint in Tinseltown was celebrated as a national triumph: a young Spanish woman had managed to seduce and conquer the Hollywood film industry. On the other hand, the fact that in Hollywood she played female archetypes at odds with the conservative morality of Catholic Spain was silenced. Decades later, after her death, the Spanish press has restored Conchita Montenegro’s fame, this time through a sensationalist, melodramatic story similar to the way Hollywood stars are promoted. Based on a comparative study between journalistic sources from both periods, this article demonstrates that the way Montenegro was treated as a film star in the press reflects the same nationalist fervour, even though the focus of her patriotic exemplariness in the 1930s gave way to a melodramatic vision of her Hollywood career more recently.