Josefina de la Torre

Josefina de la Torre Millares (25 September – 12 July 2002) was a Spanish poet, novelist, and opera singer, as well as a stage, film, radio, and television actress. She was closely associated with the Generation of ’27, an influential group of poets including Ernestina de Champourcín, Juan José Domenchina, Concha Méndez and Carmen Conde, that arose in Spanish literary circles between 1923 and 1927, essentially out of a shared desire to experience and work with avant-garde forms of art and poetry.
In 1934, de la Torre did work as a voice actress for Paramount, dubbing over Marlene Dietrich, and also dubbed Alexander Hall’s Miss Fane’s Baby Is Stolen (1934). She returned to Madrid in 1935, where she began concentrating on her theatrical and musical repertoire, becoming a successful soprano. In the 1940s, de la Torre gained a reputation as a stage actress at the Teatro Nacional, and also performed in films in the 1940s, several of which were under her brother, Claudio de la Torre. In 1946, the siblings and de la Torre’s husband, actor Ramón Corroto, formed the theatre company, Compañía de Comedias Josefina de la Torre, which put on numerous plays, including productions of Miguel Mihura’s El caso de la mujer asesinadita and Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. She continued as a Madrid-based stage actress in the 1950s and 1960s, although she published two novels in 1954, En el umbral and Memories de una estrella. Despite her success in the Spanish-speaking countries, her poems were not translated into English until 2000 when a bilingual edition of Poemas de la Isla was published with translations of two volumes of her poetry by Carlos Reyes.