Don Alvarado
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Don Alvarado (November 4, 1904 - March 31, 1967) was an American actor, assistant film director, and film production manager.
Born José Paige in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1922 he went to Los Angeles hoping to find acting work in the film industry. There, he became close friends with another Mexican actor, Luis Antonio Dámaso de Alonso, who would become a famous film star calling himself Gilbert Roland.
The struggling young actors shared a place for a time but Alvarado soon met and fell in love with sixteen-year-old Ann Boyar (1908-1990), the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. They married in 1924 and that year had a daughter, actress Joy Page. Alvarado and his wife divorced in 1930 and she remarried film mogul Jack Warner in 1936.
Don Alvarado got his first uncredited silent film part in 1924 and, with the studio capitalizing on his "Latin Lover" looks, he was very shortly cast in secondary then leading roles. The advent of talkies all but ended his starring roles but he still managed to work regularly, usually cast in secondary Spanish character roles, such as in the 1929 Thornton Wilder adaptation The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
In 1939, using the name "Don Page" for screen credit purposes, he began working as an assistant director for Warner Bros. and a few years later as a prodiction manager. In these capacities he was part of the team that made a number of highly successful films including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause in 1955, and in 1958 his final film work, The Old Man and the Sea.
Don Alvarado died of cancer in 1967, aged 62, in Hollywood and was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Hollywood Hills. For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Don Alvarado has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6504 Hollywood Blvd.
