Love stories, they usually involve a woman and a man. The one involving the supreme goddess of Spanish language cinema, Maria Felix, replaces a man with fine, fearless, and flamboyant jewelry. It’s the kind that people see in magazines, turning page after page, but not Maria Felix. The gem-loving goddess owned these pieces and had French luxury brand and jeweler Cartier to thank. Felix’s jewels have been widely covered, but not her love and obsession. Call the Maison a matchmaker who brought a beautiful woman and her baubles together in a way that the world is still telling the tale half a century later.
The Spanish movie star starred in 47 films during her career that began in the 1940s. A titular role in the 1943 film Doña Bárbara earned the beauty her nickname La Doña was from the star’s title role, about a strong independent woman. The role was definitive of the person Félix actually was- a woman who knew exactly what she was, what she liked, and how to get it.
It is a lesser-known fact that she deliberately never learned English and didn’t appear in anear in any Hollywood productions because she didn’t want to be typecast, shared The New York Times. Mexico’s Nobel Prize-winning poet Octavio Paz wrote about the star, “She’s free like the wind, she disperses the clouds, or illuminates them with the lightning flash of her gaze.”
Still, it is her taste in jewelry, or rather her uncanny taste in jewelry, that got one of the most successful figures of Latin American cinema the brightest spotlight with Cartier in the director’s chair. The most notable element of her jewelry were reptiles. Maria Félix identified snakes as the symbol of imagination, insight, and power and even modeled snake jewelry throughout her life. Listed below are exemplary examples of her bedazzling collection-
The spectacular serpents of Cartier-
The most prominent examples of this reptilian love were a Snake necklace and snake hoops. Commissioned around 1966, Felix visited the Cartier flagship on the rue de la Paix to order a snake necklace that would be a glittering replica of a giant snake. Akin to spotting a real serpent, Cartier’s 22-inch-long serpent also made jaws drop.
Over two years, skilled artisans worked tirelessly on the platinum and gold armature on the design’s interior to lend the ornament a reptile-like flexibility. Then the master craftsmen wrapped the body in diamonds, a total of 2,473 brilliant and baguette-cut diamonds totaling 178.21 carats. A masterpiece like this was undoubtedly irresistible to Maria after a two-year wait. When the piece was finished, the Mexican, out of town, chartered a plane back to Paris to get it.
Ophidians for the ears too –
Félix explicitly requested a unique set of gold hoop earrings again in a snake-shaped design that was utterly contrasting with Cartiers signature styles. Her imagination was as unrestrained as the forests these snakes slithered in. She desired a bulky pair sheathed with vibrant turquoise enamel with tiny rubies for the eyes of the snake.
“María Félix brought her outsized boldness to Cartier and trusted the jeweler to create imposing pieces that were always in good taste,” Pierre Rainero, Cartier’s image and heritage director, said in a video interview from the jeweler’s Paris headquarters. “Did María Félix influence Cartier, or was it the other way around? I would say it was a two-way street.”
The very famous Crocodile necklace-
Come 1975, Félix went all out to design her most exceptional and famed reptile jewel- a double crocodile necklace. The legend goes, to make her vision crystal clear, La Doña sashayed in Cartier with a live baby crocodile. Her bold persona and innate love for animal-themed jewels make it seem plausible.
Cartier set new standards of creativity with this piece donning yellow gold crocs with 1,023 brilliant-cut fancy intense yellow diamonds weighing 60.02 carats. Complementing deep green emerald cabochons formed the eyes. The second alligator was covered in 1,060 emeralds weighing 66.86-carats with ruby cabochon eyes for effect. In classic Maria Felix fashion, delighted to witness the gem-clad masterpiece, the wife of wealthy Romanian-born French banker Alexander Berger offered a champagne toast to all the artisans at Cartier who worked on it.
La Doña watches were introduced as a tribute to Ms. Félix-
“Only two lines of Cartier watches have been named after real persons: Santos-Dumont and La Doña,” Pierre Rainero said. Félix passed away in 2002 and never caught a glimpse of the line of La Doña watches released in 2006. The timepiece paid tribute to her bold choices with a trapezoid case that resembled a crocodile’s head, while the broadly linked bracelet was reminiscent of reptilian scales. Pierre Rainero correctly stated, “They are Cartier’s contemporary translation of the eccentric personality of a great woman.”
Apparently, before she died in 2002, Maria Félix sold the crocodile and snake necklaces, which is hard to believe considering her love and obsession with the jewels. Cartier has created many reiterations of Maria Felix’s jewels over the years, but nothing quite as brazen as the Mexican femme fatales collection.
