Ricardo Montalban
Ricardo Montalbán was a Mexican-born film, television, and character actor whose career spanned several decades in Hollywood.
Born on November 25, 1920, in Torreón, Mexico, Montalbán attended both Belmont High School and Fairfax High School during his formative years. He went on to build a broad acting career that took in film, television, voice work, and directing, and he was also known as an art collector. His country of citizenship was Mexico, and he worked extensively in the English-language entertainment industry while maintaining ties to the Spanish language throughout his life.
Montalbán accumulated a number of significant honors over the course of his career. He received an Emmy Award and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, and he was recognized with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. On the religious and civic side, he was made a Knight of the Order of St. Gregory the Great and a Knight in the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. His work as an actor was closely associated with the Western genre, one of the recurring categories his name is linked to in the record of his output. He died in Los Angeles on January 14, 2009. The range of roles he took on across film, television, and voice acting, alongside his formal recognition through awards from the Screen Actors Guild and the Television Academy, reflects the breadth of a career that moved across multiple performance disciplines.
Quotes by Ricardo Montalban
Hollywood does not write parts for people like me, an elderly gentleman, and when they find out you’re crippled, forget about it. No, I’ll never work again.
If you shake your fist, the other guy will shake his too. But if you extend your hand to shake their hand, then they will extend theirs also, and you’ve made a friend.
I found enormous opposition to my religion. It’s like if you want to strengthen your biceps, you lift heavy weight, as heavy as you can handle, and work your muscles against resistance until it grows strong. I had to do that with my religion.
Standing on soil feels so much different than standing on city pavement; it lets you look inward and reflect and see who you really are, while you see a beautiful, unspoiled land as far as the eye can see. It allows your inner life to grow.
Politics is too partisan, and sometimes patriotism is cast aside. Patriotism is honor and love of your country and your brothers and sisters. With politics I get the impression that it’s all about what’s good for the party and not necessarily what’s good for the country.
There couldn’t be better parents than mine, loving yet strict. They disciplined with love. A child without discipline is, in away, a lost child. You cannot have freedom without discipline.
True love doesn’t happen right away; it’s an ever-growing process. It develops after you’ve gone through many ups and downs, when you’ve suffered together, cried together, laughed together.
My father taught me that only through self-discipline can you achieve freedom. Pour water in a cup and you can drink; without the cup, the water would splash all over. The cup is discipline.
What is appealing is the idea of attaining the unattainable and learning from it. Once you obtain a fantasy it becomes a reality, and that reality is not as exciting as your fantasy. Through the fantasies you learn to appreciate your own realities.