Fortunio Bonanova

Who was Fortunio Bonanova?

Fortunio Bonanova is the pseudonym of Josep Lluís Moll, who was a baritone singer and a film, theater, and television actor. He occasionally worked as a producer and director.

According to Lluis Fàbregas Cuixart, the pseudonym Fortunio Bonanova referred to his desire to seek fortune, and his love of the Bonanova neighborhood in his native Palma de Mallorca.

As a young man, living under his birthname, he was a professional telegraph operator. He studied music with the Italian Giovachini. In 1921, he debuted as a singer in Tannhäuser, at the Teatre Principal in Palma. That year, along with a group of Majorcan intellectuals and Jorge Luis Borges, he signed the Ultraist Manifesto, using the name Fortunio Bonanova.

Also in 1921, he appeared in a silent film of Don Juan Tenorio by the brothers Baños, which was shown the following year in New York City and Hollywood. He later directed his own Don Juan in 1924.

In 1927, he acted in Love of Sonya, directed by Albert Parker and starring Gloria Swanson. In 1932 he had small parts in Hollywood productions featuring Joan Bennett and Mary Astor. In the same period, he appeared in New York in several operas and, more notably, in the zarzuelas La Canción del Olvido, La Duquesa del Tabarín, Los Gavilanes, and La Montería. In 1934, he returned to Spain, where he had a major role in the film El Desaparecido written and directed by Antonio Graciani. In 1935 he acted and sang in the film Poderoso Caballero, directed by Màximo Nossik.