"Frailty, thy name is woman!" When Shakespeare wrote those words for "Hamlet," he could not have imagined there would someday be a woman such as Maria Felix.
First, full disclosure: Her death doesn't touch me as much as it moves me to reflection. I never met her, I don't idolize her, and I'd be lying if I said her films influenced me in terms of becoming a film director. By the time I was born, Maria Felix--Mexican actress of mythical proportions, inimitable life force, the yardstick by which the character of Latin women is often measured--had made 46 out of the 47 films that made her famous in Mexico and abroad.
She didn't see any films of my generation because in her eyes all post-golden-age Mexican cinema was worthless: In one of her last interviews she said, "I don't see any Mexican movies because I don't feel like seeing bad stuff."
Notwithstanding her contempt for us, there's something about Maria Felix's image as a celluloid heroine that is forever embedded in Mexican cinema--past, present and future--and something about her fastidiously designed image in real life that is part of Mexican identity.
Perhaps because my lovely wife, Andrea, is English and I'm Mexican, we're always finding surreal parallels between our cultures. The latest has to do with the deaths, barely a week apart, of two iconic women from our glorious nations: the very Mexican Felix ("The Diva of Divas," "Maria Bonita," "La Dona") and the very British Queen Mother ("The Icon of the Century," "The Nation's Favorite Grandmother," "The Queen Mum").
In the days since Felix's death on April 8, a few lost souls have been vying for succession to the anachronistic title of "Diva of Divas," a notion as preposterous as the idea of royalty in a country like Mexico. What is the purpose of royalty, or of divas for that matter, as we face the new century?
Does their "highness" help us cope with our lowness? Can we escape the vicissitudes of reality by attempting to fly with their melted wings? Felix asserted that being an actress means dreaming your life away so that others can partake of the illusion. Granted that "La Dona" was the quintessentially Mexican take on royalty. Was she completely out of touch with common people, or did she understand them so profoundly that she sacrificed her own person to create an everlasting myth? She held that she behaved exactly the same way in public as when she was alone in the sanctity of her restroom: always beautiful, invulnerable and dignified.
