Sara Montiel started in movies at 15 in her native Spain where she filmed her first movie playing an Islamic princess in the 1948 film Locura de Amor, released in the US as The Mad Queen. Later worked in Mexico, starring in a dozen films in less than five years. Hollywood came calling afterwards, and she was introduced to United States moviegoers in the film Vera Cruz (1954) co-starring with Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster, and directed by Robert Aldrich. She was offered the standard seven-year contract at Columbia Pictures, which she refused, afraid of Hollywood’s typecasting policies for Hispanics. Instead she freelanced at Warner Bros. with Mario Lanza and Joan Fontaine in Serenade (1956), directed by Anthony Mann, and at RKO in Samuel Fuller’s Run of the Arrow (1957), opposite Rod Steiger and Charles Bronson. From El Ultimo Cuple (1957) on she combined filming, recording songs in five languages and performing live. Almost all of her films earned high box office results. Among the films during the 1960s and early 1970s were La Violetera (1958), Carmen, la de Ronda (1959), Mi Ultimo Tango (1960), Pecado de Amor (1961), La Bella Lola (a 1962 version of Camille), Casablanca, Nid d’espions (1963), Samba (1964), La Femme Perdue (1966), Tuset Street (1967), Esa Mujer (1969), Varietes (1971) and others. By then she had become dissatisfied with the movie industry when producers started offering her erotic roles in comedy films. In 1974 Sara Montiel announced her retirement from movies but continued performing live, recording and starring on her own variety television shows in Spain.

In November 2009, Alaska from the Spanish pop group Fangoria invited Sara Montiel to record a track sharing vocals with her for the re-release of the band’s album Absolutamente. They recorded the title track “Absolutamente” as a duet. The music video for the song was released in early 2010. She had no plans to retire, and, in May 2011, after almost 40 years without making a movie, she accepted to perform in a feature film directed by Óscar Parra de Carrizosa. The film title is Abrázame and was shot on location in La Mancha. Montiel was born María Antonia Alejandra Abad Fernández in 1928 in Campo de Criptana, Ciudad Real, Spain. She entered films after winning a beauty and talent contest at age 15. In her first movie she was credited as “María Alejandra” a shortened version of her real name. For her next film she changed her name to Sara, after her grandmother, and Montiel after the Montiel fields in the Castile–La Mancha region of her birth. Sara Montiel died in 2013 at her home in Madrid, Spain at the age of 85 from congestive heart failure.