María del Carmen Ruiz y Moragas was born in Madrid, on September 10, 1896. She was a renowned Spanish theater actress, although she went down in history as the favorite lover of King Alfonso XIII, with whom she had two children.
Carmela, as she was known in the family sphere, was the daughter of the former civil governor of Granada, Leandro Ruiz Martínez, and of María de las Mercedes Moragas Pareja, a conservative and wealthy family.
Image source: Zeleb.es
She had two brothers, José and María, and was educated by the nuns of the Sacred Hearts. Carmen stood out from a young age for mastering French and English, in addition to having an important dramatic training.
Your first steps on the tables
It was her grandmother, Carmina Pareja, who supported Carmela's artistic vocation by intervening so that she would be part, without pay, of the María Guerrero and Fernando Díaz de Mendoza company at the Princesa theater.
Quickly La Moragas, as she was known in the theatrical environment, achieved her first role in 1913, replacing Conchita Ruiz in the role of Pepita Jiménez and debuted at the Princesa theater, with a small participation in the comedy Doña Desdenes.
She also played Escarpina in El retablo de Agrellano and, a few months later, achieved one of her most important roles when she played Milagros in the play La Malquerida, written by Jacinto Benavente, the Nobel Prize winner for Spanish literature.
During his career he participated in great successes of the Spanish theater in works by Lope Vega, Agustín Moreto and Luis Vélez de Guevara. She also managed to found her own theater company, after spending some years away from the stage.
La Moragas also had a short stint in Spanish cinema, although without much success. In 1919 she participated in The Madonna of the Roses, directed by Jacinto Benavente. It took her 11 years to return to the screens, this time to play Gilda Montiel in Doña mentiras and in 1934 she would make her last appearance in Spanish cinema with Mom's Boyfriend.
A fleeting marriage
His love life also made him occupy large spaces in the press of the time, especially for his love affairs with King Alfonso XIII. They met in 1916 after the premiere of Clitemnestra, by Ambrosio Carrión, at the Fontalba de la Gran Vía theater. Queen Victoria Eugenia was also present that day.
To quell the rumors of the nascent relationship with King Alfonso XIII, Carmen's parents arranged her union with Rodolfo Gaona, a Mexican bullfighter known as the great Indian and 10 years older than La Moragas.
The union took place in November 1917 and lasted only a few months. The actress never went to see her husband for a bullfight, as she considered it a wild act, while Gaona forbade Carmen to continue her role as an actress.
He was accused of being violent and addicted to alcohol. It was Carmen who requested a divorce and the sentence was published a year later, in 1919, but he was forbidden to remarry.
His relationship with the Mexican also served as inspiration for Francisco Gómez Hidalgo to write the play La malcasada, which dealt with the marriage between a Spanish actress and an unfaithful Mexican bullfighter.
The comedy had no support on the stage so it was made into a movie in an attempt to spark a debate about divorce. She achieved great success with this version of the actress's story.
A real love
Separated from Gaona, and back in Spain, Carmen was able to continue her romance with the King and earned the nickname of La Borbona, a name given to her by the writer Rafael Alberti. Two children were born from the relationship.
In 1925, she gave birth in Florence, Italy, to her daughter Maria Teresa, who is named after one of the King's sisters who died a few years earlier from a stroke. Four years later, Leandro Alfonso was born in Madrid.
None were recognized by the King although financially he always took care of their needs. It was in 2003 when they were granted, by decree of the Spanish justice, the surname of the Royal family, although without rights or royal treatment.
It is said that the relationship between Carmen and the King was so important that the actress influenced several of Alfonso XIII's political decisions. She interceded so that Vázquez Díaz, a close friend of her because she was a great theater fan, was the painter of the frescoes in La Rábida and gave her opinion on the dismissal of the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera. The monarch, in return, always protected her economically, aware that the relationship would never be official.
The affair with the monarch came to an end with the proclamation of the Second Republic in Spain. Alfonso XIII had to leave the country with the rest of the royal family and lived in Paris his first stage of exile. The distance prevented the lovers from seeing each other again and Carmen began a relationship with Juan Chabás, a writer two years her junior.
The King's lover took advantage of her new sentimental relationship to declare herself a republican, distancing herself from the monarchy, and participated in acts of the Radical Socialist Party.
While Chabás dedicated some rehearsals to La Moragas, the actress helped him with the translation of Berenice and together they wrote a play entitled Vacations of an actress that was left unfinished due to Carmela's early death.
An early goodbye
Carmen's trajectory was cut off suddenly. In 1935, during a tour with her theater company, she fell ill with cancer of the uterus. An operation was carried out that they classified as successful in the first instance, but it was not enough.
La Moragas also began to have vision problems due to edema until she decided to return to Madrid, to die shortly after at the age of 39, on June 11, 1936, a few days after the Spanish Civil War broke out.
Different personalities from the world of the arts came to say goodbye. Her aunt Maria took care of the children.
References
- ABC. (1919). Divorce judgment, p. 23. Recovered from hemeroteca.abc.es
- Carmen Ruiz Moragas - Royal Academy of History. (2019). Recovered from dbe.rah.es
- De Mingo, A. (2017). 'La malcasada' (Francisco Gómez-Hidalgo, 1926): The (silent) film of a journalist from Toledo. La Tribuna, pp. 16-17. Recovered from academia.edu
- Pérez Bazo, J. (2015). The Bourbon. Madrid: Izana.
- Pérez Bazo, J. (2016). Carmen Moragas "La Borbona" From the mistress of Alfonso XIII to a republican actress. Clio: History Magazine, (172), 44-48. Recovered from comunicacionymas.es
- Pérez Bazo, J., Lissorgues, I., & Chabás, J. (1992). Juan Chabás and his time (pp. 44-45). Barcelona: Anthropos.
- Martín Escribano, I. (2011). The Plague of the Bourbons (2nd ed., Pp. 479-481). Madrid: Vision Books.
- Nash, M. (1983). Woman, family and work in Spain (1875-1936) (p. 211). Barcelona: Anthropos.
- Vallvey, A. (2016). Powerful lovers of history. Madrid: The Sphere of Books.