Who was Leonard Bernsteins wife, Felicia Montealegre?

May 2024 · 6 minute read

This article shares in detail about the wife of Leonard Bernstein, Felicia Montealegre, an American conductor.

Actress and social activist Felicia Montealegre was married to American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. She was of Costa Rican and Chilean descent.

Her influence was felt strongly in political movements supporting racial equality, working women’s rights, and anti-war campaigns. She was also a successful and versatile actor who performed alongside the greatest conductors on the world’s largest concert and opera stages, as well as in popular Broadway plays and TV series.

The Netflix movie Maestro, which is based on Leonard Bernstein’s marriage to Montealegre, is directed and stars Bradley Cooper. But how did they meet and who was she?

Below, we go into her intriguing life.

What was Felicia Montealegre best known for?

On February 6, 1922, Felicia María Cohn Montealegre was born in San José, Costa Rica. Her father, Roy Elwood Cohn, was an American mining executive stationed in San José for work, and her mother, Clemencia Cristina Montealegre Carazo, was a Costa Rican.

Soon after her birth, Montealegre’s father’s job required the family to relocate to Chile, where she was raised and received her education.

She first pursued her love of performing in Chile at an early age. When she was in her early twenties, she moved to New York in 1944 after making her professional acting debut in Santiago.

She had always desired to go to the US, so when she was 21 years old, she traveled to the US embassy in Santiago to swear allegiance to the country. Two years later, she emigrated to the United States and lived there for the rest of her life.

Montealegre moved to New York under the auspices of pursuing classical music. She did have piano lessons with the famous Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau, but also enrolled in the Drama Workshop of the New School for Social Research, and studied acting with Austrian-American actor Herbert Berghof.

She made her Broadway debut in 1946, appearing in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s Swan Song.

Alongside acting, Montealegre was a prolific social activist. In 1963 she became the first chair of the Women’s Division of the New York Civil Liberties Union and she was also a bold anti-war protestor, including in the grassroots campaign Another Mother for Peace, which she co-founded.

She worked a stint at Amnesty International, including for behind-the-scenes efforts in her native Chile during its political turmoil in the 1970s.

She famously hosted a Black Panther fundraising party in 1970, going against the tide of the political mainstream of the time. And in 1972 she was among 100 people who were arrested at an anti-war demonstration in Washington DC.

Which television shows and theatre did Felicia Montealegre act in?

Felicia Montealegre is well-known for her work on television productions produced by The Chevrolet Tele-Theatre, Goodyear Playhouse, and Studio One. She acted in shows such as Mary Violet Heberden’s 1949 The Oath of Hippocrates and four Suspense series episodes (1949–1954).

She also played with Charlton Heston in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1949) and Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1950).

On July 20, 1946, Montealegre made her Broadway debut in Swan Song at The Booth Theatre. She covered for Leora Dana in the 1950 Broadway production of The Happy Time, starring Eva Gabor and Richard Hart.

Throughout her career, Montealegre returned to Broadway, performing in the 1976 production of Poor Murderer, which was directed by her former teacher Herbert Berghof. She also had a reputation for Shakespearean roles, appearing in productions of The Merchant of Venice and Henry V.

Montealegre also made appearances on concert and opera stages, where he played dramatic parts in pieces of classical music. She played the titular part of Joan in Arthur Honegger’s Joan of Arc at the Stake multiple times, and she narrated Lukas Foss’ 1957 Parable of Death, which was based on the esoteric poem by Rilke.

In 1973, she made her stage debut as Andromache in Berlioz’s Les Troyens at the Metropolitan Opera.

How did Felicia Montealegre meet Leonard Bernstein?

In 1946, Felicia Montealegre and Leonard Bernstein crossed paths at a party in New York. Claudio Arrau, a pianist from Chile who Montealegre studied with after moving to New York, was the party’s host. By the end of the year that they met, Bernstein and Montealegre were engaged.

Soon after, though, they called off their engagement, and it took them four years to get back together. Their bond was strengthened by that reconnection, and in September 1951 they were wed.

In the four years between her and Bernstein’s last engagement and their marriage, Montealegre had dated actor Richard Hart. Her romance with Hart came to an abrupt end when the actor passed away unexpectedly at the age of 35 from a coronary blockage. He passed away in Montealegre’s arms.

Being Leonard Bernstein’s wife

After practically mingling in the same circles—as demonstrated by Arrau’s party and Montealegre’s experience with orchestras and music—the couple became a loving and supporting couple. The story of Montealegre and Bernstein seems simple at first glance.

Behind closed doors, though, things weren’t nearly so easy. In 1976, Montealegre and Bernstein called off their first engagement and declared a trial separation with the “hope of reconciliation.”

Although letters and anecdotes from their lives amply attest to the love and respect that existed between Montealegre and Bernstein, and as Bradley Cooper’s film Maestro portrays, that doesn’t mean that their relationship wasn’t also volatile.

To begin with, Montealegre was by no means unaware of Bernstein’s sexual orientation.

“You are a homosexual and may never change – you don’t admit to the possibility of a double life, but if your peace of mind, your health, and your whole nervous system depends on a certain sexual pattern what can you do?,” she once wrote in a letter to Berstein who was according to West Side Story collaborator Arthur Laurents, “a gay man who got married [and] wasn’t conflicted about his sexual orientation at all. He was just gay.”

Their decision to remain married and raise their three children as a family supports their shared aspirations.

Beyond her time with Bernstein, Montealegre encountered prominent people in every field she followed, such as Jackie Kennedy and writer Boris Pasternak, as well as pianist Glenn Gould, soprano Maria Callas, actor Lauren Bacall, and photographer Richard Avedon.

She took up painting, studying under renowned artist Jane Wilson, and liked extravagant floral arrangements—something she famously referred to as her “single greatest extravagance.”

source: www.ghbase.com

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