Right now, many of us are struggling with the everyday demands of living in a pandemic-plagued world. Some of us are turning to entertainment to help us cope, yet the entertainment industry is being hard hit by the loss of revenue streams. This isn’t the first time this has happened. Before Myrtle Gonzalez died from the misnamed Spanish Flu (H1N1), she and other Latin actresses helped open the movie studio doors to generations of entertainers.

Gonzalez was born on September 28, 1891, in Los Angeles, California. Her father, Manuel George Gonzalez, was a grocer, while her mother, Lillian L. Cook, had been an opera singer. On her father’s side, Gonzalez was Spanish, or perhaps Mexican; on her mother’s, Irish. Gonzalez was the oldest of three siblings, with a sister Stella and a brother Manuel.

Gonzalez first turned to music, performing at church and local charity events. Later publicity about her life claims that she studied music and languages at an unnamed Los Angeles “convent,” but that may be mere hype. At some point, she married J. Parks Jones, Sr., because the two had a son around 1911. The two may have divorced in 1913, but accounts vary on that fact.

After a few local plays, Gonzalez joined the VitagraphCompany of America, a silent-era movie studio, and became one of their stock actors. The studio grew, becoming the oldest and most profitable movie production company in the early quarter of the 20th century. As a resultof her talent and exposure, Gonzalez contracted withUniversal Studios in 1912. Universal would eventually buy Vitagraph in 1925.

Though she primarily worked in shorter productions (69 of them, as listed on IMDb.com), she had several longer moving pictures. Gonzalez’s first longer production was Captain Alvarez in 1914. Her first starring longer movie was in The Chalice of Courage in 1915. She also starred in It Happened in Honolulu (1916), followed by nine more major pieces, eight of them in the starring role.

One of the reasons for her success was undoubtedly her lighter skin tone, but consider that she continued to use her father’s surname, undeniably Spanish, even after her first marriage. No one would think of her as being Anglo.

[Please insert this credit under the movie photo: Still image from The Chalice of Courage (1915) showing actors William Duncan and Myrtle Gonzalez.]

She married Allen Watt on December 1, 1917. The two met at Universal Studios, where he had been an actor and was an assistant director. As was common at the time, this ended Gonzalez’s screen career so she could follow her husband to Washington State when he joined the army to help during WWI.

Did Camp Lewis’s wetter and cooler climate affectGonzalez’s health? That is the claim seen in many mentionsof her death, but she was well-known for her rugged roles, with most of her longer film work taking place in forests and snow-covered terrains. A 1912 Photoplay Magazine photo of her listed her interests as riding, sailing, basketball, and tennis. If she had a weak heart, as claimed in biographies, it must not have caused her many problems until after her marriage.

Whatever the initial cause, Gonzalez’s health became fragile, prompting Watt to get special consideration so he was placed on retirement. This allowed the couple to move back to California, where he could direct for Universal Studios while Gonzalez recovered under the care of her parents in Los Angeles. She caught H1N1 as it began to devastate the region. By October 22, 1918, the flu proved too much for her, and she passed away. Unfortunately, as with much of the history of silent film, most of Gonzalez’s movies and shorts have been lost; clips and reviews of just a handful still exist.