Patricia Medina

Patricia Medina
Medina with her husband Joseph Cotten in 1973, by Allan Warren
Born	Patricia Paz Maria Medina 19 July 1919 (1919-07-19) Liverpool, England, U.K.
Other names	Patricia Medina Cotten
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1937-78
Spouse	Richard Greene (1941–1951) Joseph Cotten (1960–1994) (his death)

Patricia Paz Maria Medina (born 19 July 1919) is an English actress from Liverpool, England. Her father was a Spaniard (Ramón Medina Nebot from the Canary Islands) and her mother was English. Medina began acting as a teenager in the late 1930s. She worked her way up to leading roles in the mid-1940s, whereupon she left for Hollywood.

Career

In 1950's Fortunes of Captain Blood, she teamed up with British actor Louis Hayward. She and Hayward subsequently appeared together in 1951's The Lady and the Bandit and Lady in the Iron Mask and Captain Pirate, both from 1952.

Darkly beautiful, Medina was often typecast in period melodramas such as The Black Knight. Two of her more notable films were William Witney's Stranger at My Door and Orson Welles' Mr. Arkadin, a follow-up to The Third Man, based on the radio series The Lives of Harry Lime.

Although prolific during the early 1950s, her film career petered out by the end of the decade. She performed in four episodes of Walt Disney's Zorro in 1958 as Margarita Cortazar. In 1958 she also appeared as "The Lady" Diana Coulter in two episodes of Richard Boone's Have Gun, Will Travel. In 1968, she returned to the big screen in Robert Aldrich's adaptation of the lesbian-themed drama The Killing of Sister George.

She and her husband, American actor Joseph Cotten, toured together in several plays and on Broadway in the murder mystery Calculated Risk. Her appearances on television include an episode of Bonanza titled "The Spanish Grant" (originally aired 6 February 1960) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour titled "See the Monkey Dance" (originally aired 9 November 1964). She also appeared in the [(Perry Mason)] series episode #41 entitled, "The Lucky Loser" as Harriet Balfour which aired in 1958.

Autobiography

In 1998, Patricia Medina Cotten published an autobiography, Laid Back in Hollywood: Remembering.

Personal

Medina married actor British Richard Greene on 24 December 1941 in St. James's Church, Spanish Place, London. They divorced in 1951. Medina married Cotten on 20 October 1960 in Beverly Hills at the home of David O. Selznick and Jennifer Jones.

Partial filmography

Siren of Bagdad (1953) with Hans Conried and Paul Henreid

• Mr. Satan (1938)
• Hotel Reserve (1944)
• Don't Take It to Heart (1944)
• Kiss the Bride Goodbye (1945)
• The Secret Heart (1946)
• The Foxes of Harrow (1947)
• The Three Musketeers (1948)
• The Fighting O'Flynn (1949)
• Children of Chance (1949)
• Francis (1950)
• Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion (1950)
• The Jackpot (1950)
• Valentino (1951)
• Botany Bay (1953)
• Sangaree (1953)
• Plunder of the Sun (1953)
• Siren of Bagdad (1953)
• Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954)
• The Black Knight (1954)
• Mr. Arkadin (1955)
• The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956)
• Uranium Boom (1956)
• Battle of the V-1 (1958)
• Count Your Blessings (1959)
• Rawhide (1960)
• Snow White and the Three Stooges (1961)
• The Killing of Sister George (1968)
• Latitude Zero (1969)

External links

• Patricia Medina at the Internet Movie Database
• Patricia Medina at the Internet Broadway Database
• Photograph