Roland, Gilbert

(b. 11 December 1905 in Juarez, Mexico; d. 15 May 1994 in Beverly Hills, California), Mexican-American actor whose career spanned seven decades, from silent films to television, including eleven films as the legendary Cisco Kid.

Roland was born Luis Antonio Damasco de Alonso, the second of six children born to Don Francisco and Consuelo Alonso. Roland’s father came from Spain and, following family tradition, trained as a matador. During the Mexican Revolution, when Pancho Villa occupied Juarez, allegedly threatening the lives of all Mexicans born in Spain, the Alonso family moved to El Paso, Texas. Growing up in the barrios of El Paso, where he learned English, Roland helped support his family by selling newspapers. The young man also saw his first moving picture in El Paso and was captivated by the cinema. He later remarked, “As a child living near the Rio Grande, a great love came into my life. All my life I have loved all the people on the screen. It became an obsession.”

At age thirteen or fourteen, Roland, hoping to find a career in film, hopped a train and headed to Hollywood, arriving in Los Angeles with $2.60 in his pocket. For the next several years, he survived by taking odd jobs, such as unloading ships at Catalina Island, but his passion for the cinema remained. Fearing that his Mexican name might hold back his fledgling career, Roland in 1922 chose his screen name by combining those of two performers he admired, actor John Gilbert and serial queen Ruth Roland. Earning $2 a day and a box lunch, Roland worked as an extra on such silent films us blood and sand (1922) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925).

Beginning to despair of breaking into the motion picture business, Roland was considering following family tradition and going to Spain to learn bullfighting when he was “discovered” by agent Ivan Kahn, who helped secure the aspiring Mexican actor a contract for the second lead in The Plastic Age (1925) opposite Clara Bow. In 1927 Roland secured his first leading role with Camille opposite Norma Talmadge. Through the late 1920s Roland was cast as the fiery “Latin lover,” with lead roles in such films as Rose of the Golden West (1927), The Woman Disputed (1928), and New York Nights (1929).

Roland made the transition from silent films to sound, although in the 1930s his career as a leading man waned, and he appeared in more supporting roles. His film credits during the decade include Resurrection (1931) opposite Lupe Valez; Call Her Savage (1932), in which Roland portrayed a half-breed alongside Clara Bow; She Done Him Wrong (1933), in which Roland was cast as a South American gigolo opposite Mae West; Thunder Trail (1937), a Western melodrama; The Last Train from Madrid (1937), for which Roland received excellent reviews; the historical epic Juarez (1939); and The Sea Hawk (1940) with Errol Flynn. In addition, Roland made several Spanish-language features.

In 1941 Roland married the actress Constance Bennett, and the couple had two children before the marriage dissolved in the mid-1940s, allegedly because Bennett’s stardom had exceeded that of her husband. In 1942 Roland became an American citizen, and he subsequently served as an intelligence officer in the Army Air Corps during World War II.

Returning to Hollywood after the war, Roland portrayed the Cisco Kid, based on a 1904 O. Henry short story entitled “The Caballero’s Way,” in a series of popular films for Monogram Studios. “My Cisco Kid might have been a bandit,” Roland later said, “but he fought for the poor and was a civilized man in the true sense of the word.” Referring to a scene in which Cisco was reading Shakespeare, Roland told the Los Angeles Times, “I wanted to make sure the Mexicano was not portrayed as an unwashed, uneducated, savage clown.”

In 1949 Roland’s career took an upward turn when the director John Huston tapped him to portray a Cuban revolutionary in We Were Strangers, for which the actor earned accolades from film critics. Roland flourished during the 1950s, as he was cast as a key supporting player in such films as The Bullfighter and the Lady (1951), in which he depicted an aging matador; The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima (1952); director Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) opposite Lana Turner; Thunder Bay (1953) with James Stewart; Underwater (1955) opposite Jane Russell; Three Violent People (1956); and The Big Circus (1952), in which Roland portrayed a circus aerialist who walked over Niagara Falls. In 1954 he married Guillermina Cantu of Mexico City.

While sustaining his feature film career in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Roland also became a frequent guest star on television, appearing in the series Zorro, Wagon Train, Medical Center, High Chaparral, Kung Fu, Hart to Hart, and The Sacketts. Among his later film roles were John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964), in which Roland played a Native American; Any Gun Can Play (1968); Running Wild (1973); The Black Pearl (1977); and Islands in the Stream (1978). His final performance in a feature film was as a Mexican patriarch in the Western Barbarosa (1982), with Willie Nelson. Roland also became an author, placing human-interest stories in such magazines as Good Housekeeping and Reader’s Digest. In 1980 Roland was honored for his work as a Latin American in the entertainment industry with the Los Nosotros Golden Eagle Award. Diagnosed with cancer, he died at age eighty-eight in his home and was buried in Beverly Hills.

Roland’s screen career spanned more than seventy years from the silent cinema to television, with more than 100 films to his credit. Ever conscious of his Mexican heritage, Roland was noted for working to assure that Hollywood offered positive screen images, rather than racial stereotypes, of Latin Americans.

Roland’s life and career are chronicled in Gary D. Keller, A Biographical Handbook of Hispanics and United States Film (1997), and Luis Reyes and Peter Rubie, Hispanics in Hollywood: An Encyclopedia of Film and Television (1994). For an example of Roland’s writing, see “Ten Things That Make My Heart Beat Faster,” Good Housekeeping (Apr. 1956). Obituaries are in the New York Times (18 May 1994) and Los Angeles Times (17 May 1994).

Ron Briley