Elena Jurado
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lena Jurado Wingate
"The Swede"
"The Island Cinderella"
Elena Jurado | |
|---|---|
 Elena Jurado in 1927 | |
| Born | May 19, 1901 Sibonga, Cebu, Philippines |
| Died | May 19, 1974 (aged 73) Los Angeles, California, US |
| Other names | Lena Jones Lena Jurado Wingate "The Swede" "The Island Cinderella" |
| Known for | First Filipina silent film actress in Hollywood |
Elena Jurado (1901–1974) was a pioneering Asian-American actress working primarily in silent films during the 1920s. Upon her retirement from the film industry she became an educator. She is credited with being the first Southeast Asian actress to appear in Hollywood films.
Jurado born on May 19, 1901, in Sibonga, Cebu, Philippines, to U.S. Army Sergeant Mark Lewis Jacobs and Placida Jurado.[1] Her father, Mark Jacobs was a career military man in (Company H, 19th Military Regiment) working with the Signal Corps on telegraph communications during the Philippine-American War. Jacobs eventually attained the rank of colonel and served in World War I.[2] Elena spent her developmental years at Camp Jossman, a military base on the island of Guimaras. There she attended school with children of U.S. Army and civil officers.[3]
Jacobs left the Philippines in 1913 with his military unit, leaving Placida and Elena behind with Elena being sent to a convent school in Manila for a year. With the written consent of her mother, Elena was first married in 1914 to Ira Jones at San Agustin Church in Intramuros, Manila.[3] Jurado departed the Philippines on May 20, 1919 with her husband bound for San Francisco.[3] According to the 1920 census, the couple spent a short time in Georgetown, California near the gold fields, where Ira found work as an electrician.[4] Shortly thereafter, they moved to San Francisco, California and she began to study radio communications. Jurado responded to a casting call in September 1921 to portray an Arabian woman in White Hands, a film set along the Algerian coast being produced by Max Graf. The film was being shot in a studio in San Mateo, California and along the Pacific shore beaches of San Francisco. As a result of an encounter on the set with lead actor Hobart Bosworth, (who would later become a director and film producer in his own right) he was able to convince Graf to hire her based upon her singing and dancing abilities demonstrated in her audition screen test. Bosworth also invited Jurado to audition for his own upcoming productions as well, thus beginning her career in film.[1][4]