Are you really a nepo baby if you’re the director of Children of the Corn II? Still, its director’s grandmother, Adele Mara, was quite the woman. His grandfather was, too, and we’ll probably get to him at some point, but for now, her. In fact, we’re kind of doing the family in reverse order of note, since we come to Adele by way of her brother, Luis Delgado, who was James Garner’s long-time stand-in among other things and doesn’t even have his own Wikipedia page. She has one, but she’s less prominent than her husband. The pair had four children together, all of whom have IMDb pages.
Mara was born Adelaide Delgado; her parents were Spanish. At age six, she won dance lessons in a theatre door prize. Six years later, she was seen dancing by Xavier Cugat, who hired her three years later. She was able to get a contract with Columbia Pictures. Initially, she used the stage name Adele St. Mara. Soon, it was Adele Mara. She would later move to Republic Pictures and from there started in television. She mostly retired when her sons with Roy Huggins were born.
I’ve no doubt the name change stems from the suspicion that she might not be Spanish by audiences. At the time, Spanish descent was barely acceptable, but she and Rita Hayworth, whose sister she played once, both changed their names and in Hayworth’s case appearance to appear more “white.” While Mara would play a lot of women of more northern European descent—let’s face it, “O’Hara” is not a Spanish name—she would also play an awful lot of women in Westerns who weren’t exactly Eastern schoolmarm types. This gets into a whole big debate about what Spanish colonization in the US Southwest looked like, and I’m just too tired for that right now. She never did Zorro, but she did do two episodes of the Disneyland miniseries The Saga of Andy Barnett as a character named Estrellita.
Honestly I don’t remember her from The Sands of Iwo Jima. I barely remember that movie at all, and you couldn’t prove by me that there were any women in it at all. I haven’t seen The Fighting Seabees, another movie she did with John Wayne, but she apparently taught him to jitterbug for it and now I kind of want to? I’ve seen some things she’s been in, but the ones I’ve seen, she’s either uncredited or eighth-billed at best. She would rise to second-billed—I haven’t gone through her filmography in its entirety to check, but I don’t think she ever got all the way to first-billed—but mostly in forgettable things.
While she wasn’t a star, she did work with a lot of them. John Wayne, obviously, and she was John Agar’s love interest in The Sands of Iwo Jima. But in herearly days, she appeared in assorted Three Stooges shorts. She was in at least one movie with Anita Ekberg. Peter Lorre. Victor Mature. Vincent Price. Angie Dickinson. Forrest Tucker. Gene Autry. Sterling Holloway. William Frawley. And, yes, a lot of people who don’t even rise to “the guy who played Fred on I Love Lucy,” true, but still. And, of course, she worked with James Garner, because her husband created Maverick and she was on three episodes. And somehow her brother got hired as Garner’s stand-in, as well we know.
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