People get into acting for all sorts of reasons. Margarita Martinez-Cannon, whose IMDb page is clearly incomplete and who doesn’t have a Wikipedia page at all, was cast in Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy. There was a scene involving children, and she decided to bring her daughter along. Her daughter didn’t want to go, because she had sports practice. Martinez-Cannon told young Patrice that Kris Kristofferson was in it; somehow, Patrice had come away from A Star Is Born with a crush on him. (Look, I’ve seen that movie. I don’t get it.) So Patrice went for the chance to meet him. A star may not have been born, but the Acting Bug stirred.
Not that most people have the slightest idea who she is, and frankly today’s article image won’t help with that. If I showed her painted green and with her wrists displayed, you’d know, however. Or in The Three Amigos, which I’ve never seen all the way through and so can’t tell you about her character. Or wooed by Thomas Magnum; apparently, she’s the one romantic interest of the whole show who made it back for the series finale. She was also a stage actress, though details on that are always harder to track down. In short, a prolific actress whose “long illness” (no one seems to know what it was) robbed us of a talent.
But, yes, I’ll always think of her first from the lesser live-action Zorro series. It aired on the Family Channel when I was a teenager, and I was weirdly obsessed with it. Its Don Diego was nowhere near Guy Williams caliber, goodness knows, and the choice to replace the great Gene Sheldon with a teenager was clearly intended to get me to ignore that, but it was vastly entertaining. Martinez played Victoria, owner of the tavern and apex of the classic superhero love triangle—of course she was friendly toward Don Diego, but he was no Zorro, was he? Because of this, there are a lot of pictures of her out there tied up and waiting to be rescued by Zorro.
Victoria was much more of the Lois Lane mold than the Vicki Vale mold. She was, like both of them, a woman in a “man’s job,” running her tavern in the small town that everyone forgets Los Angeles used to be. Yes, she was captured a lot, but she kept going, and she didn’t put up with anyone’s crap. Sergeant Garcia had become Sergeant Mendoza, and she was vaguely friendly but willing to tell him off if the situation required it. She’s a fun character in a fun, if never quite fully good, show.
In short, it’s a shame that she isn’t better known. I think everyone probably has a mental image of her, from Beetlejuice if nothing else. Clearly, she deserved better; I found out while researching this that she’d actually gotten a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Acting. That’s prestigious as hell, the sort of thing where you’d have to be really good. Yet somehow the only person from that show who went on to great acclaim was twice-appearing Daniel Craig.
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