The unfortunate death of Tyrone Power at the age of 44 when he was filming

He seduced the female audience with his beauty and younger viewers with his adventure films.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
15 August 2022 Monday 01:09
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The unfortunate death of Tyrone Power at the age of 44 when he was filming

He seduced the female audience with his beauty and younger viewers with his adventure films. He was Zorro, Jesse James, the bullfighter Juan Gallardo or the pirate Jamie Waring, although he also had the opportunity to demonstrate his dramatic talent in films such as Knife Edge or Witness for the Prosecution. Tyrone Power (1914-1958) worked on a hundred films, reached stardom and could have reached more, but he was prevented by his early and sudden death at the age of 44 when he was filming Solomon and the Queen of Sheba in Madrid .

It was not difficult for Power to enter the world of cinema. He had two good credentials: an actor father and an enviable physique. Thanks to his father's support, the young Tyrone participated as a supporting actor in several films throughout the 1930s and also acted in the theater. At the end of the decade, Fox signed him, they wanted him to star in romantic and adventure films and to compete with the great stars of other studios such as Errol Flynn, Clark Gable or Cary Grant.

His first important role came from the hand of Henry King in Lloyds of London (1936). The actor and the director began as a result of this film, a melodrama about the creation of the British insurer, a collaboration that would bear good fruit at the box office. In addition, Power's role in the film helped the studio give him the lead in Love and Journalism (Tay Garnett, 1937) where he played a gossip reporter who writes chronicles about a young millionaire, Loretta Young, who, fed up with , fights back by publishing a false news about her supposed courtship with the annoying journalist.

The film worked and the actor repeated as a leading man in other titles such as Thin Ice (Sidney Lanfield, 1937), Café Metropol (Edward H. Griffith, 1937), again with Loretta Young, a rich heiress whom he has to fall in love with to pay off. a debt, or Second Honeymoon (Walter Lang, 1937), where he seduced Young for the third consecutive time. By now, women all over the world were pining for Power, but the studio decided to give him a more dramatic character in In Old Chicago (Henry King, 1938) where he played a young man who rivals his brother, Don Ameche, on how manage the city and also for the love of Alice Faye.

The trio repeated under the same director in a musical, The Alexander Band (1938). Tyrone got a much more serious character in his next job as Count Axel Von Fersen, who falls in love with Marie Antoinette in the film of the same title directed by W. S. Van Dyke in 1938 based on the biography of the queen of France written by Stefan Zweig. The year ended with another biopic, that of the engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps, in Suez (Allan Dwan), where Power was again accompanied by Loretta Young.

At the end of the 30s, the doors of action and adventure cinema opened for the actor. In Land of the Bold (Henry King, 1939) he played the outlaw Jesse James. He was replicating Henry Fonda as his brother, Frank James. However, Power returned to musicals and melodrama before settling down as an action movie star. He returned to work with Alice Faye in He's My Man (Gregory Ratoff, 1939) to later star in one of his most popular films, The Rains Came (Clarence Brown, 1939), where he was Rama Safti, an Indian doctor who suffers from colonialism according to the novel by Louis Bromfield.

Power's life was going from strength to strength. He was successful as an actor, he was known all over the world and that same year he married his first wife, the French actress Annabella. In addition, he won public recognition as the gangster in Johnny Apollo (Henry Hathaway, 1940) and, above all, as Don Diego de la Vega in The Sign of Zorro (Rouben Mamoulian, 1940), where he fought for justice masked and with that sword in hand with which he drew his sign, the famous Z.

His reputation did nothing but grow thanks to titles like The Son of Fury (John Cromwell, 1942), where he was the bastard of a rich English landowner who sets sail in search of pearls to make his fortune and falls in love with a beautiful Polynesian played by Gene Tierney or The Black Swan (Henry King, 1942) that took a large cast, Power, Maureen O'Hara, George Sanders and Anthony Quinn, to the Caribbean seas in the days of piracy. A full color film that triumphed at the box office. Power convinced the audience to become the pirate Jamie Waring according to the novel by Rafael Sabatini.

The film adaptation of another novel, Blood and Sand, by Blasco Ibánez would be Power's last film before enlisting in the Navy to participate in World War II. In the film, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, the actor was the famous bullfighter Juan Gallardo, who fell for the charms of a spectacular Doña Sol played by Rita Hayworth. Power returned from the fight three years later. He had changed. He was more mature. He broke up with his wife and remarried Mexican actress Linda Christian.

The couple, who became a regular in the gossip magazines of the time, had two daughters, Romina Power, who succeeded as a singer in Italy in a duet with Al Bano, and the late Taryn Power, who also chose the path of performance. The actor had a new life and the studios decided to give him more dramatic and risky roles and thus he became Larry Darrell, the protagonist of the adaptation of Somerset Maugham's novel On the Edge of the Razor (Edmund Goulding, 1946), a tortured man for his participation in the war that seeks the spiritual to give meaning to life.

The height of his career came at the hands of two greats, Agatha Christie and Billy Wilder. The director decided to adapt a short story by the writer and the result was an unforgettable film, Witness for the Prosecution (1957), in which Power was accused of murder. The defense fell to Charles Laughton and a mysterious Marlene Dietrich provided the necessary dose of intrigue. The film had just been released when Power received an offer to shoot Solomon and the Queen of Sheba with Gina Lollobrigida under the orders of King Vidor in Madrid.

Tyrone moved to the Spanish capital with his third wife, Debbie Minardos, who was pregnant. The couple made friends in the city. On the night of November 14, 1958 they went out to dinner "at a typical Madrid restaurant with the bullfighter Luis Migue Dominguín and the Countess of Quintanilla", according to the chronicle of La Vanguardia. On the 15th "Power went to the shoot dressed as King Solomon, with a full beard and wearing leather braces and boots. He played a scene in which he fought with his treacherous brother, George Sanders. Sword duel. In the scene in which he has to kill his brother, he dies", continued the story of this newspaper.

"He said his left arm hurt a lot. Then his right arm hurt. They sat him in a chair and his co-producer Ted Eichmondle gave him a glass of cognac, which he couldn't drink. At that point he died. He was transferred to the Ruber clinic. There they stitched him up with desperate injections", but the actor had been admitted as a corpse and the doctors could not do anything: "He was lying on the operating bed, dressed as King Solomon, and that gave death itself a more fantastic air, more implausible than its unbelievable reality".

Power was only 44 years old. His father, also named Tyrone, died in the same way, very young, of a heart attack during the filming of Miracle Man. His posthumous child, Tyrone Power IV, was born four months later, in February 1959. George Sanders, the actor Power was dueling with when he had his heart attack, also died in Spain a few years later. He committed suicide in a hotel in Castelldefels in 1972.