Katy Jurado, the fiery-eyed Mexican actress who has died aged 78, reached her widest audience as the ex-girlfriend of the honour-bound marshal Gary Cooper in High Noon in ; her performance, which included a memorable confrontation with the marshal's new bride, played by year-old Grace Kelly, won her a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress. Two years later, Katy Jurado was nominated for an Oscar after her performance in Broken Lance as Senora Devereaux, the wife of the cattle baron played by Spencer Tracy.
In Mexico, she won the Ariel, the country's highest acting accolade, three times. Her smouldering eyes and luscious red lips won her legions of adoring fans all over the world. She was born Maria Cristina Jurado Garcia on January 16 at Guadalajara, near Mexico City, the daughter of a former landowner stripped of his property during the revolution. The cinema soon attracted her, and she made her first film at 16, after marrying the author Victor Velazquez, which enabled her to act in films without her parents' consent.
The couple had two sons, but divorced in In the s, she made more than a dozen films, most notably Nosotros los Pobres , directed by Ismael Rodriguez and starring Pedro Infante. She supplemented her income as a journalist covering bullfights. In , when Budd Boetticher went to Mexico to shoot The Bullfighter and the Lady , he saw Katy Jurado sitting in the terraces of a bullring, wearing a pure white dress. He lost no time in casting her as the wife of an ageing bullfighter, even though she could not read a word of the script.
The next year, Fred Zinnemann, the director of High Noon , cast her as the passionate and strong Helen Ramirez, whose character was a stark contrast to the virginal Amy Fowler Kane, played by Grace Kelly. High Noon was the first of a series of Westerns for her, many of them unworthy of her acting talent.
One film where it did work was The Badlanders , in which she gave one of her best performances as the attractive prostitute who falls for the cowboy played by Ernest Borgnine. She and Borgnine were soon lovers off screen too, and in they entered into a stormy marriage. After their divorce in , Borgnine reported: "Katy was beautiful.
