Jacob Krantz (1900-77) was the son of Jewish parents with East European backgrounds, but he grew up to have features that bore comparison with Latin lovers such as Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro. With this in mind, he took Ricardo Cortez as his screen name.
By 1923, Cortez was getting featured character parts, and he occasionally played the lead, most memorably as the first Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1931). One of his prominent supporting roles, a year earlier, was with Joan Crawford in Montana Moon.
Cortez also directed seven low-budget programmers for 20th Century-Fox between 1938 and 1940.
His last big screen appearance was in a film that gave a number of other actors from Hollywood’s Golden Age their last hurrah: John Ford’s The Last Hurrah (1958). After a guest spot in an episode of Bonanza in 1960, Cortex became a stockbroker.
Ricardo Cortez’s brother, Stanley Cortez, was a celebrated cinematographer.
