Raquel Torres

Torres was born in Hermosillo to a German emigrant father and a Mexican mother. Her mother died while Raquel was very young and the family moved to the United States, where she spent most of her time. Her name change, including adoption of her mother's maiden surname, as well as speaking with a fake accent, was done to capitalize on, and conform to, early Hollywood's idea of 'Latin-ness'. Torres played a Polynesian beauty in White Shadows in the South Seas (1928), a silent film shot in Tahiti which was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's first feature fully synchronized with music and effects. She gained the role after 300 applicants were rejected. She also became the first person to have her voice recorded as part of "a new system in the selection of motion picture talent".

The next year she was third-billed behind Lili Damita and Ernest Torrence in The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929), the first film version of the classic Thornton Wilder novel, which was a part-talkie. This Oscar winner (for Art Direction) was an early disaster movie that bonded a group of strangers who see their lives flash before their eyes while trapped on a collapsing bridge. Torres' other 1929 film was The Desert Rider (1929), a standard western in which she provided spicy diversion opposite cowboy star Tim McCoy.

Torres continued the tropical island pace with The Sea Bat (1930) and Aloha (1931) playing various island girls and biracial beauty types. Also in 1931, she had a vaudeville act in New York. On Broadway, she played Teresa in Adam Had Two Sons (1932).

In her last year of filming, she played a sexy foil to the raucous comedy teams of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey in So This Is Africa (1933) and the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (1933). It was Torres to whom Groucho delivered his classic line: "I could dance with you until the cows came home. On second thought, I'd rather dance with the cows until you came home."

Torres abruptly retired following her marriage to businessman Stephen Ames in 1935. Her husband later produced postwar "B" films but she never returned to the film industry even with her husband's "in" connection.