Ramon novarro net worth

Where did ramon novarro live
Ramon novarro home
Ramon novarro movies

•

Ramon Novarro was born José Ramón Gil Samaniego on February 6, 1899 in Durango, Mexico, to Leonor (Gavilan) and Dr. Mariano N. Samaniego Siqueiros, a prosperous dentist. Ramon and his family moved to Los Angeles in 1913, as refugees from the Mexican Revolution. After stints as a ballet dancer, piano teacher and singing waiter, he became a film extra in 1917. For five years he remained an extra until director Rex Ingram cast him as Rupert in The Prisoner of Zenda (1922). He was cast with Lewis Stone and Ingram's wife, Alice Terry (Ingram was also the person who suggested that he change his name to Novarro). He worked with Ingram in his next four films and was again teamed with Terry in the successful Scaramouche (1923). Novarro's rising popularity among female moviegoers resulted in his being billed as the "New Valentino". In 1925 he appeared in his most famous role, as the title character in Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), and later co-starred with Norma Shearer in The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (1927). His first talking picture was Call of the Fles

•

On October 30, 1968, two young hustlers rang the doorbell of a house in Laurel Canyon. They were invited in by a 69-year-old man dressed in a robe. A few hours later, the man would be found dead. He had been badly beaten and had choked to death on his own blood.

That man was Hollywood’s Latin lover, Ramon Novarro. His murder brought his sexuality out in the open, something he had taken pains to hide throughout his career, and he inadvertently became a symbol of gay Hollywood.

Jose Ramon Gil Samaniego was born in 1899 in Durango, Mexico. His wealthy family emigrated to the US as part of a wave of Mexicans escaping the Mexican Revolution. They settled in Los Angeles where Samaniego, who could pass for Caucasian, tried to break into show business. For a while, he held a day job as a singing waiter as he worked bit parts in films, for which he was credited as Ramon Samaniego. In 1922, he was cast as Rupert of Hentzau in Rex Ingram’s silent The Prisoner of Zenda: on Ingram’s advice, he changed his last name to Novarro. Ingram next gave him a role in Scaramouche in 1923, which

•

The Violent Death of Ramón Novarro

In 1968, Ramón Novarro was murdered just a mile or so from where I was living, yet it pretty much escaped my notice.

Looking back, you might think it would have commanded media headlines for days — the bloody murder of America’s first genuine Mexican movie idol, the star of 1925’s “Ben-Hur” and so many other films.

But newspapers back then weren’t what they are today. They were not yet obsessed with celebrityhood and mayhem. Even in Los Angeles, editors clung to their convictions about which news items deserved our attention.

So the story of Ramón Novarro’s bludgeoned body being found inside his Laurel Canyon home blazed across page one for just a single day, then jumped to the back pages. It remained buried there through the ensuing weeks of funerals, criminal investigations and a series of court trials.

A few years after Ramón made his final headlines in the town he once owned, my wife and I bought a small house in Laurel Canyon, only a block or so from where the murder occurred. That’s when I started to take an interest in his story