• • Rafaela Ottiano [born 4 March 1888 in Venice, Italy] was part of the original Broadway cast when MAE WEST brought her hit "Diamond Lil" to the Royale Theatre in April 1928.
Onstage Rafaela Ottiano played Rita; her co-conspirator Juarez was played by Jack La Rue. The willowy brunette [height: 5' 5½"] reprised her role in the film version: She Done Him Wrong opposite Gilbert Roland, who was born in Mexico though cast as a manipulative Muskovite.
For the movie, the Hays Office changed the ethnicity of the villains from Spanish to Russian.
• • After establishing herself on the Italian stage, actress Rafaela Ottiano came to American films in 1924. During the talkie era, Ottiano specialized in sinister, spiteful characterizations. As the aging trollop Russian Rita in She Done Him Wrong (1933), she meets a well-deserved end at the hands of Mae West.
• • In The Devil Doll (1935), Ottiano makes clear her plans to exploit her scientist husband's "miniaturization" process by hissing malevolently, "We'll make the whole world small!" A somewhat more benign Rafaela Ottiano can be seen in Grand Hotel (1932), in which she plays the overprotective maidservant of ballerina Greta Garbo, and Curly Top (1935), in which her sour severity melts when exposed to the relentless sunshine exuded by Shirley Temple.
• • Rafaela Ottiano lived in the Times Square area during the Prohibition Era. She never married.
• • Ottiano died [18 August 1942 in East Boston, Massachusetts] of intestinal cancer at age 54.
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Mae West
• • Photo: Mae West • • Rafaela Ottiano • • 1933 • •
NYC
Mae West.
miss ottiano interesting actress who worked with the best!
ReplyDeleteShe was the sister-in-law of my great uncle. She often visited her family in East Boston and the children were never allowed to talk to her as she wanted her privacy. She had very long black hair and an alabaster skin. Although the Internet reports she was 5'5" my mother said she was small and petite.
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