Mexican actress was in ‘The Pearl’

Maria Elena Marques, 83, a Mexican actress who starred in the 1947 movie “The Pearl,” died of heart failure Tuesday, her family announced in Mexico City.

Marques played the long-suffering wife of a fisherman who finds a beautiful but ill-fated pearl in the film based on a book by John Steinbeck.

The film, directed by Emilio Fernandez, won a Golden Globe award for the luminous cinematography of Gabriel Figueroa.

One of the few surviving stars of Mexico’s “Golden Age” of movies of the 1940s and early 1950s, Marques also appeared in the 1943 movie “Dona Barbara” alongside actress Maria Felix. She later played Native American roles in two U.S. films, “Across the Wide Missouri” (1951), opposite Clark Gable, and “Ambush at Tomahawk Gap” (1953).