Linda Cristal

Actress

LINDA CRISTAL, who has died at 89, was a star of the TV western series The High Chaparral, cast as an aristocratic Mexican rancher’s daughter who marries the main character, played by Leif Erickson.

The American show was a fixture on the BBC in the early 1970s and Ms Cristal one of its most visible stars – not least for her mixed-race on-screen relationship, which was considered controversial at the time.

She recalled having won the part after throwing her script away at her audition and improvising her lines instead. It was a performance that eventually won her a Golden Globe award as best TV actress.

Born Marta Victoria Moya in Buenos Aires, she was said to have fled the local mafia as a child, and her family went to Montevideo in Uruguay, living in poverty in a tenement.

After the deaths of her parents, she went to Mexico, where the producer Miguel Alemán launched her screen career in the 1952 production, When the Fog Lifts.

She appeared in a string of Mexican films before heading for Hollywood in 1956, where she had heard that casting directors were seeking a Latina heroine to appear opposite Dana Andrews in the western Comanche. She auditioned and got the part, and more soon followed, in similar vein.

She was a Mexican ranch owner’s daughter in The Last of the Fast Guns and the Argentinian pin-up who accompanied Tony Curtis to Paris in Blake Edwards’ 1958 comedy, The Perfect Furlough.

She was also cast as Cleopatra in the 1959 Italian-FrenchSpanish production, Legions of the Nile. But it was the western genre that was her métier, and her co-stars included John Wayne and James Stewart.

She remained a familiar face both in film and on TV after

The High Chaparral ended its four-season run, but eventually retreated to daytime soap operas before retiring to run an importexport business.

She married three times, first in 1950 to the Argentinian actor Tito Gómez – a union that was annulled after a few weeks – then to a businessman, Robert Champion and finally to fellow actor Yale Wexler, with whom she had two sons