Movita Castaneda, who starred in the 1935 Best Picture Oscar winner Mutiny on the Bounty with Clark Gable, has died. She was believed to be 98.
Barbara Sternig, a family friend, confirmed to the Los Angeles Times that she died on Thursday following a neck injury. She died at a rehab center in Los Angeles.
Castaneda was born to Mexican parents in Arizona and grew up in Los Angeles. While her family said she was born in 1916, other sources listed her birth as in 1921. Indeed, even when she was a young actress at MGM, her age wasn’t clear. She said that she was 14 when she started there, not 19 as the studio claimed.
It was actually RKO that signed her, putting her in the first Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movie Flying Down to Rio. Billed only as Movita, she appeared in several other films throughout the 1930s, including a role as a young Tahitian in Mutiny on the Bounty. She also appeared in John Ford’s Fort Apache.
She was first married to Irish boxer Jack Doyle in 1939 and they divorced in 1944. In the early 1950s, she met Marlon Brando, who tried to keep their 1960 marriage a mystery. They had a son and a daughter together during their two-year marriage.
Brando starred in the 1962 remake of Bounty and met his third wife, Tarita Teri'ipaia, during the making of the film. They married in 1962 and divorced in 1972.
Castaneda continued acting into the ‘80s. As The Hollywood Reporter notes, she appeared in episodes of CBS’ Knots Landing.