About Margo
Margo was a Mexican actress and dancer. She appeared in many film, stage, and television productions, including Lost Horizon , The Leopard Man , Viva Zapata! , and I'll Cry Tomorrow . She married actor Eddie Albert in 1945 and was later known as Margo Albert.
Margo was born into a musically talented family in Mexico City in 1917. As a child, she trained as a dancer with Eduardo Cansino, the father of Rita Hayworth. At the age of nine, she began dancing professionally with her uncle Xavier Cugat and his band in performances at Mexican nightclubs.
Margo travelled to the United States as a child, living in New York City with her aunt, singer Carmen Castillo. While accompanying her uncle's band during a performance at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, Margo was noticed by producer and director Ben Hecht and screenwriter Charles MacArthur, who cast the 17-year-old performer as the lead in their film Crime Without Passion. Margo also played the character of Miriamne Esdras both on stage and in the 1936 film version of Winterset, which one critic called a "cinemagoer's must". Other notable roles in the 1930s include parts in the 1937 film Lost Horizon and Broadway productions of Maxwell Anderson's Masque of Kings and Sidney Kingsley's The World We Make .
While Margo continued to act in films until the 1960s, her career was curtailed by the television blacklist that began in 1950, with the targeting of Gypsy Rose Lee, Jean Muir, Hazel Scott, and Ireene Wicker. Margo held progressive political views, but she was not a member of the Communist Party. In 1950, her name and that of her husband, Eddie Albert, were published in Red Channels, an anti-Communist pamphlet that purported to expose Communist influence within the entertainment industry. Red Channels labeled her a communist because of her support for the Hollywood Ten, her advocacy for peace, and her support for refugees.
In 1964, she played the role of Selena in the Rawhide episode "A Man Called Mushy".
Albert's son spoke of his parents' blacklisting in an interview published in December 1972, crediting Albert's service during World War II with ultimately saving his career.
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