22 Facts About Sara Montiel

Maria Antonia Abad Fernandez MML, known professionally as Sara Montiel, Sarita Montiel, was a Spanish actress and singer.

Sara Montiel began her career in the 1940s and became the most internationally popular and highest paid star of Spanish cinema in the 1960s.

Sara Montiel appeared in nearly fifty films and recorded around 500 songs in five different languages.

Sara Montiel began her acting career in Spain starring in films such as Don Quixote and Madness for Love.

Sara Montiel moved to Mexico where she starred in films such as Women's Prison and Red Fury.

Sara Montiel then moved to the United States and worked in three Hollywood English-language films Vera Cruz, Serenade and Run of the Arrow.

Sara Montiel returned to Spain to star in the musical films The Last Torch Song and The Violet Seller.

Sara Montiel then established herself as a singer thanks to the songs she performed in her films and combined filming new musical films, recording songs and performing live.

Sara Montiel was married four times and adopted two children.

Sara Montiel started in movies at sixteen in her native Spain, where she appeared in a secondary role in her first movie, Te quiero para mi in 1944, immediately followed by a leading role in Empezo en boda in 1944.

Sara Montiel was offered the standard seven-year contract at Columbia Pictures, which she refused, afraid of Hollywood's typecasting policies for Hispanics.

Sara Montiel signed a contract with Hispavox to record and release the soundtrack albums of her films for which she netted the ten per cent of the records sale as royalties.

Sara Montiel was the highest paid star of Spanish cinema, and many years later, she began to say that she had been paid more than US$1 million for each of these films, something that the press widely reported as the actual figure.

Sara Montiel, whose complete name was Maria Antonia Alejandra Vicenta Elpidia Isidora Abad Fernandez, was born in 1928 in Campo de Criptana, Spain.

Sara Montiel entered films after winning a talent contest at age fifteen.

Sara Montiel was married four times, and was ex-communicated by the Catholic Church in Spain for the civil-wedding ceremony of her first marriage:.

In 2000, Sara Montiel published her autobiography Memories: To Live Is a Pleasure, written by playwright Pedro Villora, an instant best seller with ten editions to date.

Sara Montiel claimed a long-term affair in the 1940s with playwright Miguel Mihura and mentioned that scientist Severo Ochoa, a Nobel Prize winner, was the true love of her life.

Sara Montiel died in 2013 at her home in Madrid at the age of eighty-five from congestive heart failure, and was buried in the San Justo Cemetery in Madrid.

The Sara Montiel Museum, opened in 1991, is a museum in Campo de Criptana dedicated to her.

The stamp that pays tribute to Sara Montiel depicts her in a scene from The Violet Seller.

Sara Montiel was portrayed in the Pedro Almodovar film Bad Education by a male actor in drag as the cross-dressing character Zahara, and a film clip from one of her movies was used, as well.