Viva La Diva!

She is known as La Dona, The Devourer of Men, Maria Bonita, La Generala. She is a woman of power, fame, fortune and charisma, who in a land of machos, threw their machismo back in their faces with near supernatural force.

Maria Felix, the iconic Mexican movie star, is scheduled to receive a lifetime achievement award Saturday at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival. Festival organizers have been gingerly and frantically trying to confirm her appearance. But they are braced for the worst--they know La Dona will show up if she feels like it. She is after all a diva--and an octogenarian diva at that.

She has outlived her son, three husbands, countless lovers and at 85 is as lucid as daylight and still has a tremendous wit. Though she has some ailments, she is remarkably healthy and in great spirits.

But as festival officials feared, she said by phone from her home in Mexico City that she may or may not show up.

“Tell everyone in Los Angeles that I send them all the best and I hope to see them all very soon,” she said. “I want the best for my fellow Mexicans there. But tell them to stop crossing the Rio Grande. Tell them to stay here in Mexico. Tell them that even if I am not there physically, I am there in spirit. And at the last minute, maybe I will go.”

This has made life extremely difficult for the festival’s organizers.

“Look, we knew what we were getting into when we decided this but we really wanted to honor her,” said festival co-founder Edward James Olmos, who has made contact with Felix several times over the phone. “No one in film history has ever attacked the screen with such acting, beauty and understanding like Maria Felix. For us to be able to honor her in the twilight of her life is a God-given gift. This is truly the ultimate, the star of stars living today.”

Like John Wayne personifying the mythic American cowboy, Felix became the symbol of a beautiful yet shrewd and tough Mexican woman. She represented an ideal of hardiness and tenderness; untamable and yet irresistible to men.

The festival will screen some of her classic films including “Dona Barbara,” “Rio Escondido,” and “Maclovia” starting tonight, capping the tribute with a screening of “Enamorada” on Saturday night. Celebrities such as Salma Hayek, Rita Moreno, Andy Garcia, Rosie Perez and John Leguizamo are expected to attend the tribute, which will be hosted by Olmos.

“She was not a great actress. But she had a grand presence,” Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsivais said in a recent interview. “She was so beautiful and with such personality and a power that commanded authority. That was a first, a very unusual thing for a woman in Mexico.”

Most Americans don’t know her because she never had an interest in making films in Hollywood. Unfortunately today in Mexico, Felix says, television is outshining cinema. Besides, most actors today are lacking in charisma and personality, she believes.

“We took things much more seriously back then,” said Felix, who starred in more than 47 movies. “You know, style is something that one carries innately. You cannot teach someone to have style.”

She reigned in an era when being different, being an original, was an asset. “She was this mix of Bette Davis in her presence and Eva Peron in her dominion over her audiences and the descamisados [the shirtless masses],” said Monsivais.

And she still makes men tremble in their shoes.

In his novella “Holy Place,” Carlos Fuentes created a character representing Felix as a dominating egoist. Fuentes was a close personal friend of Felix. But when the novella was published, Felix didn’t take kindly to his portrayal of her, and Fuentes has suffered her wrath ever since.

“Look, a goddess is a goddess. That is all that I can say,” a flustered Fuentes said from his home in London.

Counterpart to Dolores Del Rio

With one look of her deep brown eyes, Felix could curdle a man’s blood or melt his heart. She and actress Dolores Del Rio were the yin and yang of Mexican cinema. While Del Rio, who was seven years older, usually played the more fragile, genteel beauty coveted by men, Felix was the tough gal with a sharp tongue.

“While Dolores was the actress you couldn’t harm or violate in any way, Maria was a woman you would challenge and get beaten back,” said Michael Donnelly, who has restored several classic Mexican films including most of Felix’s. “While Mexican society is viewed as a macho male society, strong women dominate and figure prominently in Mexican history.”

Born April 8, 1914, in the northern region of Sonora, Mexico, Felix showed signs of a feisty fearlessness at an early age. She grew up riding horses bareback--an act not taken lightly in an era and country when nice girls rode sidesaddle. She regularly showed off her prowess, jumping from one galloping horse to another. She looks back on those days fondly but dismisses her daredevil horseback riding to a folly of youth.

“You know, when you are young you don’t pay attention to danger,” she said.

As a teenager, she won a beauty contest and eventually met and married a cosmetics salesman named Enrique Alvarez. In 1934, at the age of 19, she gave birth to her only child, Enrique Alvarez Felix.

Her big break in film came in 1942 with “Penon de las Animas,” (Rock of Souls). But her iconic image as La Dona (the Grand Dame) did not become an integral part of Mexican culture until “Dona Barbara,” which was made in 1943.

In the movie, based on the popular Venezuelan novel by Romulo Gallegos, Felix starred as the tyrannical ranch owner ruling over the Venezuelan countryside. Her character played into the centuries-old notion of woman as the personification of evil, the downfall of man and destroyer of civilization. Felix relished the part and it became the first meaty role of her career.

“It fit her personality so well because it was the story of a ranch-owning woman who had this magical power over men,” said Donnelly. “She not only had magical sexual powers, but real mojo. She had this real machorra kind of feel about her.” But Felix said she was not going to play the part originally. The director had another actress in mind until Gallegos saw Felix and declared on the spot: “That is Dona Barbara.”

“It’s funny. I wasn’t going to be Dona Barbara,” she said. “But today, even my parrot calls me La Dona. You can write a letter and address it to La Dona and it will arrive here at my home. But I was so young when I did the role. I didn’t think I could do the role of such an experienced and mature woman. But, you know, surely at various moments in my life I was as bad as Dona Barbara.”

With her status as superstar solidified, Felix followed “Dona Barbara” with such films as “La Devoradora” (The Devourer) and then her biggest hit, “Enamorada.” It is her personal favorite.

A Mexican version of “Taming of the Shrew,” Felix played up her domineering charm, as the gun-toting daughter of the town’s wealthiest citizen. In the end, she gives up her bourgeois life and becomes a soldadera at the side of her love interest--a revolutionary general of humble origins played by Pedro Armendariz. In one of her first scenes in that movie, she seduces Armendariz’s character by literally slapping him to the ground.

Here, she began a working relationship with the greatest team of filmmakers in Mexican history: director Emilio “El Indio” Fernandez, actor Armendariz and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa.

“I never really thought of them as geniuses or pondered what it was like to work with them because we were all such good friends,” she said.

The 1946 film was so successful that Hollywood attempted to make an English version of it, called “The Torch.” They used the same script, hired the same director--Fernandez, the same cinematographer--Figueroa, and the same lead actor--Armendariz. But instead of Felix, who showed no interest in Hollywood and does not speak English well, the studio cast Paulette Goddard. “The Torch” failed dismally.

From “Enamorada” she went on to further carve a place for herself as a symbol of nationalist pride. In 1947, she reteamed with Fernandez and Figueroa, to make “Rio Escondido.” She plays a patriotic schoolteacher sent to the impoverished countryside by the president in an effort to educate the masses. Once she arrives she confronts the town caudillo, a treacherous, violent man.

Monsivais joked in one review that the movie was like a fable in which “the miraculous teacher defeats the evil dragon by slaying him with the alphabet.” But the role raised her stature from a leading actress to Mexican cultural icon.

As a classic Mexican beauty, her looks were played up by Fernandez and Figueroa to symbolize la patria. She wore the traditional rebozo, a colorful shawl, and exalted the values of one of Mexico’s most revered presidents, Benito Juarez. About this, Felix is unusually modest.

“Well, I don’t know about being a symbol of patriotism,” she said. “I played a schoolteacher who had some health problems, and that will always strike a chord with people’s hearts.”

Stardom Coincides With Economic Boom

Though her screen image was usually one of humble Mexican woman siding with the poor masses, her lifestyle was more like Elizabeth Taylor or Princess Grace of Monaco. As her box-office clout increased, her personal life became more sensational as well.

Her stardom came during one of Mexico’s greatest economic booms. In late 1940s Mexico, under President Miguel Aleman, lavishness was the style among the upper classes. Monsivais writes in his book “Mexican Postcards” that under Aleman, the ethos was “society as showcase and pedestal: There was a frenzied desire to exhibit one’s possessions . . . .”

Felix, of course, was the center of the show. During the filming of “Maclovia” in 1948, when government minister Jorge Pasquel was courting Felix, he accompanied her from Mexico City to Patzcuaro. Felix recounted in a 1976 interview: “We traveled with six Cadillacs following behind us carrying uniformed waiters, hairdressers, a cook, a valet, three maids, a masseur . . . . We ate at a pretty spot on the road. In a twinkling of an eye, the servants put up tents, a ‘stand’ so Jorge could practice his shooting and a table with a long tablecloth where the cook served up a fantastic banquet . . . .”

Felix divorced her first husband in 1938. And soon after, in 1943, she began an affair with Mexico’s great composer Agustin Lara--a torturous one, with all the grand drama worthy of Lara’s lyrics or Felix’s films.

“He had a terrible temper, but what talent he had!” she said. “He was also charming and congenial. And, of course, what style.”

When their affair ended, she married another Mexican actor and singer, Jorge Negrete, in 1952. When Negrete died one year later in Los Angeles, Felix was embroiled in a bitter lawsuit over a $50,000 emerald necklace, which was bought but not entirely paid for by Negrete before he died.

Negrete’s daughter claimed it as part of her father’s estate. Felix claimed it as a wedding present. A headline in the Los Angeles Times from 1955 declared: “Mexican Men Back the Claim of Actor’s Widow, Women Think It Should Go to His Daughter.” One government official even proposed “that the men of Mexico . . . instead of raving about the beauty of Maria, pay tribute to it by paying off the debt on her necklace.” Felix says she paid the necklace off in full.

In 1956, she married a French millionaire and horse breeder, Alex Berger, and stayed with him until his death in 1974. During this time she worked with notable European directors such as Jean Renoir and Luis Bunuel. Since the mid-1980s she has lived with painter Antoine Tzapoff.

Some of the bad press she has gotten over the years may be justified. She certainly relished the role as diva, some say.

But to her critics, Felix lashes out with the ferocity of Dona Barbara. She detested a Vanity Fair piece done about her in 1990. “They got everything wrong, and they picked absolutely awful pictures.”

If she were a journalist covering herself, what would she say?

“Let them try to find another one like me. They will never find another like me,” she said. “To be like me, one needs to have led the life I have led, and no one has led the life I have led.”

For a schedule of the Maria Felix screenings, visit the festival Web site: https://www.latinofilm.org. All screenings are at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd.