Vintage original 10 x 13 in. double-weight glossy silver gelatin print photograph of the beautiful and popular Mexican-born actress, RAQUEL TORRES.
 
Taken in 1928 during the association with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), she is depicted in costume, most likely for the film, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, directed by Charles Brabin. This photograph was taken by MGM’s most prestigious photographer, Ruth Harriet Louise. There is a blind stamp at the bottom right edge as well as a “Ruth Harriet Louise” ink stamp on the verso and the “Raquel Torres Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer” ink stamp. It is in near-fine condition with two light inter creases, one at the center of her chest and a diagonal one at the center of her face, and neither show unless held up to the light.
 
*"Raquel Torres (born Paula Marie Osterman or Wilhelmina von Osterman; November 11, 1908 – August 10, 1987) was a Mexican-born American film actress and the sister of actress Renee Torres.
 
Torres played a Polynesian beauty in White Shadows in the South Seas (1928), a silent film shot in Tahitiwhich was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's first feature fully synchronized with music and effects. She gained the role after 300 applicants were rejected. She also became the first person to have her voice recorded as part of "a new system in the selection of motion picture talent".
 
The next year she was third-billed behind Lili Damita and Ernest Torrence in The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929), the first film version of the classic Thornton Wilder novel, which was a part-talkie. This Oscar winner (for Art Direction) was an early disaster movie that bonded a group of strangers who see their lives flash before their eyes while trapped on a collapsing bridge. Torres' other 1929 film was The Desert Rider (1929), a standard western in which she provided spicy diversion opposite cowboy star Tim McCoy. Torres continued the tropical island pace with The Sea Bat (1930) and Aloha (1931) playing various island girls and biracial beauty types. Also in 1931, she had a vaudeville act in New York. On Broadway, she played Teresa in Adam Had Two Sons (1932).
 
In her last year of filming, she played a sexy foil to the raucous comedy teams of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey in So This Is Africa (1933) and the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (1933). It was Torres to whom Groucho delivered his classic line: "I could dance with you until the cows came home. On second thought, I'd rather dance with the cows until you came home."Torres abruptly retired following her marriage to businessman Stephen Ames in 1935. Her husband later produced postwar "B" films but she never returned to the film industry even with her husband's "in" connection."
*(source: Wikipedia)
 
Ruth Harriet Louise (born Ruth Goldstein, January 13, 1903 – October 12, 1940) was an American photographer. She was the first woman photographer active in Hollywood and she ran Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's portrait studio from 1925 to 1930. Louise began working as a portrait photographer in 1922, working out of a music store down the block from the New Brunswick temple at which her father was a rabbi. Most of her photographs from this period are of family members and members of her father's temple congregation.
 
In 1925, she moved to Los Angeles and established a small photo studio on Hollywood and Vine. Louise's first published Hollywood photo was of Vilma Banky in costume for The Dark Angel (1925), which appeared in Photoplay magazine in September 1925. When Louise was hired by MGM as chief portrait photographer, she was twenty-two years old and the only woman working as a portrait photographer for the Hollywood studios. In a career that lasted only five years, Louise photographed all the stars, contract players, and many of the hopefuls who passed through the studio's front gates, including Greta Garbo (Louise was one of only seven photographers permitted to make portraits of her), Lon Chaney, John Gilbert, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, Anna May Wong, Nina Mae McKinney, and Norma Shearer. It is estimated that she took more than 100,000 photos during her tenure at MGM. Today she is considered an equal with George Hurrell Sr. and other renowned glamour photographers of the era. In addition to paying close attention to costume and setting for studio photographs, Louise also incorporated aspects of modernist movements such as Cubism, futurism, and German expressionism into her studio portraits.
 
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