Film & TV / Theatre & dance
Adele Mara
1923–2010 · actress, dancer, singer
Highland Park-born dancer and actress of 1940s westerns and Sands of Iwo Jima, the daughter of Spanish immigrants, who started out in Xavier Cugat's show.
- Born
Highland Park, Michigan- Died
Pacific Palisades, California
aged 87- Birth name
- Adelaide Delgado
- Detroit years
- 1923–c. 1940
- Field
- Film & TV, Theatre & dance
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Adele Mara was born Adelaide Delgado in 1923 in Highland Park, the auto-industry enclave inside Detroit, to Spanish immigrant parents, Angel and Eloisa Delgado. A dancer and singer from her youth, she performed in bandleader Xavier Cugat's Latin revue, and she went on to win a contract with Columbia Pictures. There she learned the trade in B pictures and comedy shorts, appearing in You Were Never Lovelier (1942) with Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth. She then moved to Republic Pictures, where she became a regular in westerns and adventure films and played opposite John Wayne in Wake of the Red Witch and Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). On television she was the leading lady in three episodes of Maverick, created by her husband, the writer-producer Roy Huggins. Her Detroit-area link is her birth and upbringing in a Spanish-American family in Highland Park.
Highlights
- Played John Agar's love interest in Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)
- A fixture of Republic Pictures westerns in the 1940s
- Danced in Xavier Cugat's show
- Leading lady in three episodes of Maverick