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Consuelo Lopez, R.N.

Consuelo Lopez, R.N.

In many ways, Elena Verdugo’s role of Consuelo Lopez, nurse, office manager, and confidant for two Anglo doctors in Marcus Welby, M.D., is reminiscent of another breakthrough nurse’s role of the era, that of Diahann Carroll as Julia Baker in Julia (1968-1971), the first series headlined by an African American woman not playing a domestic servant. Like Carroll, Verdugo had been the first actor of her ethnicity to star in a television series-Meet Millie in the 1950’s-and the producers and writers of Welby handled Consuelo’s ethnic heritage much as those of Julia handled that of their title character: Her background was treated as an integral part of her role and identity, but rarely in confrontational or overtly political ways. In both series, the “ethnic” nurse is paired with an older, Anglo-white, patriarchal but likable doctor played by a veteran film star: Lloyd Nolan in Julia and Robert Young in Welby. Although Verdugo appeared in almost every episode of the long-running series, Consuelo was only rarely the focal character. Nonetheless, when the scriptwriters did give the nurse center stage, the episodes were often very good and respectful of Latino culture. The best of these appeared in the series’ first season on January 27, 1970. Entitled “The Legacy,” it featured Latina film legend Dolores del Río as Consuelo’s aristocratic mother, Carlotta Lopez de Guadalupe. The story provided sharp and telling contrasts between the philosophical, thoughtful approach Carlotta and Consuelo take toward a medical crisis with that of an “uptight” Anglo woman played by another film veteran, Janet Blair.


See Also

Lynda Carter

Dolores del Río

Carmen Zapata

Great Lives from History: Latinos

Elena Verdugo

by Thomas Du Bose

American actor

Best known as nurse Consuelo Lopez in the long-running television medical drama series Marcus Welby, M.D., in the 1960’s and 1970’s, Verdugo excelled in a wide variety of entertainment venues, including film, music, dance, radio, and television. Although sometimes listed among performers who were victims of stereotyping, she played throughout her lengthy career characters from many ethnicities and backgrounds.

Areas of achievement: Radio and television; acting; dance

Early Life

Elena Verdugo (ay-LAY-nah vehr-DEW-goh) was born Elena Angela Verdugo in a region of Califonia where her family had lived since the 1770’s. She began to learn Mexican folk-dancing at the age of three, started formal dance training at the age of five, and debuted as a child actor the following year in Cavalier of the West (1931). Beginning in her early teen years, she danced in a number of diverse films, for example the musical Down Argentine Way (1940), the bull-fighting epic Blood and Sand (1941), and the war film To the Shores of Tripoli (1942). In 1942, she played her first major role, that of the Tahitian girl Ata, who serves as a model for the painter Paul Gaugin in The Moon and Sixpence. Around the same time, she also sang briefly with the orchestra of Spanish bandleader Xavier Cugat and performed on one of his biggest hit recordings, “Tico-Tico.”

Elena Verdugo.

324_Vergugo_Elena.jpg

(Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Her next film role was also that of a Polynesian woman in Rainbow Island (1944). That same year, she took on her most famous screen role, that of the Romany (Gypsy) girl Ilonka in Universal’s House of Frankenstein. Although she would forever after be associated with Universal Studios and its horror-film franchise and would work for Universal steadily, she never signed a contract, purportedly because executives insisted that she lose weight, something Verdugo steadfastly refused to do. An irony of her contentious relationship with Universal is that her Verdugo ancestors once owned the property on which the studios stand.

Life’s Work

Verdugo’s role in House of Frankenstein made her an icon for fans of early horror films. Although she danced and sang in the film, it was her fine acting abilities that were displayed for perhaps the first time. Ilonka is the love interest of Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.), the werewolf introduced in The Wolf Man (1941), and her actions and attitudes presage much of the innovation in horror film and literature that would emerge later in the 1960’s and 1970’s, in which good-hearted, right-minded characters are often depicted as tolerant and sympathetic toward the “monsters” among them. Ilonka falls in love with Talbot, and even after she discovers that he is a werewolf, she does not reject or desert him; her love remains steadfast as she tries to help him battle his curse. As Ilonka, Verdugo enacts for the first time a ritual that quickly became part of popular werewolf lore: In order to free Talbot forever from his lycanthropic fate, she, as one who truly loves him, shoots him with a gun loaded with silver bullets. This now-formulaic trope of how to dispatch a werewolf is for the most part a creation of Universal scriptwriters and is not found in European folklore. Nevertheless, it provides Verdugo with a touching, terrifying scene, one which she plays with great pathos and believability.

After her role in House of Frankenstein, Verdugo continued to work regularly in films, sometimes portraying Latina women, as in Strange Voyage (1946) and The Big Sombrero (1949), and sometimes playing “Anglos” (people of a non-Latino ethnicity), as in Little Giant (1946) and the Charlie Chan mystery The Sky Dragon (1949). However, in 1952, Verdugo’s career took an important turn away from films when she accepted her first role in television: three appearances in the syndicated espionage series Dangerous Assignment, starring another silver-screen veteran, Brian Donlevy. Although she continued to appear in films occasionally during the 1950’s, notably in Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), in The Pathfinder (1952), and in the title role of Panama Sal (1957), most of the rest of her career was spent in television.

Shortly after completing her work on Dangerous Assignment, Verdugo became the first Latina to play the starring role in a television series. The series was a situation comedy called Meet Millie, which ran from October of 1952 until March of 1956 on CBS. It was an almost prototypal American sitcom. Verdugo portrayed Millie Bronson, a secretary in New York City, and the supporting characters were typical of the genre: a boyfriend, an irascible boss, a meddling mother, and an eccentric neighbor. Nevertheless, it was a milestone for Latino actors as well as for Verdugo, who would never have to worry about falling victim to typecasting as a Latina or other “exotic” character. After Meet Millie was cancelled in 1956, Verdugo appeared frequently in other popular television series of the 1950’s and 1960’s, both comedies and dramas. Perhaps her most memorable role guest-starring in a situation comedy was that of Janice Tuttle, a sexy and flirtatious real-estate agent on an episode of The Bob Cummings Show in 1958. In 1959, she played a diametrically opposite role, U.S. Air Force captain Maggie Gallagher, in an episode of the aviation drama, Steve Canyon.

In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, Verdugo began to take on recurring roles in series: The Red Skelton Hour (1956-1960), The New Phil Silvers Show (1964), Many Happy Returns (1964-1965), and Mona McCluskey (1965-1966). In these comedies, she played Anglos or characters of indeterminate ethnicity, but her best television role before her success in Marcus Welby, M.D., was that of the Latina innkeeper Gerry, manager of a hotel called the Gran Quivera, opposite Richard Egan in Redigo (1963), a drama series about ranchers in the modern American Southwest. She began her most important television portrayal, that of Consuelo Lopez, in the fall of 1969 and continued to play the compassionate but level-headed nurse until the show’s cancellation in 1976. During 1971 and 1972, she was nominated for a Golden Globe award for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama and was twice nominated for an Emmy Award in the same category. She reprised the role in the made-for-TV reunion film, The Return of Marcus Welby, M.D., in 1984.

Significance

Throughout her long and diverse career, Verdugo established herself as a multitalented, highly versatile performer. In her films, she played numerous ethnicities and became part of the folkloric heritage of the classic Universal horror films of the 1930’s and 1940’s. In the 1950’s, she became the first Latina to star in her own television series, and in the 1970’s she became the most visible Latina on prime-time television through her portrayal of nurse Lopez on Marcus Welby, M.D., one of the most highly rated series of the decade.

Further Reading

1 

Arroyo, Juliet. Early Glendale. San Francisco: Arcadia, 2005. Contains a chapter on Verdugo’s family history in California.

2 

Kalisch, Philip Arthur. Images of Nurses on Television. New York: Springer, 1983. Provides context and comparison for Verdugo’s role of Consuelo Lopez.

3 

Riley, Philip J., ed. House of Frankenstein (Universal Flimscripts Series, Volume 6). Chesterfield, N.J.: Magicimage Filmbooks, 1990. The script of Verdugo’s most famous film.

4 

Weaver, Tom, and Michael and John Brunar. Universal Horrors. 2d ed. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1990. History and overview of the studio at which Verdugo filmed most of her films of the 1930’s and 1940’s.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Bose, Thomas Du. "Elena Verdugo." Great Lives from History: Latinos, edited by Carmen Tafolla & Martha P. Cotera, Salem Press, 2012. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLL_10013240064101001.
APA 7th
Bose, T. D. (2012). Elena Verdugo. In C. Tafolla & M. P. Cotera (Eds.), Great Lives from History: Latinos. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Bose, Thomas Du. "Elena Verdugo." Edited by Carmen Tafolla & Martha P. Cotera. Great Lives from History: Latinos. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2012. Accessed October 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.