Patricia Medina Dies At 92 After Long Hollywood Acting Career

Patricia Medina died at 92 Saturday after a long, successful Hollywood acting career that saw her sharing the stage with top 1950s actors like Glenn Ford and Louis Hayward.

The leading dame passed away Wednesday at Barlow Respiratory Hospital in Los Angeles, Calif., after being in declining health for some time, her friend Meredith Silverbach told the Los Angeles Times.

She was a stunning woman, Silverbach told the Times. In her youth, they called her 'the most beautiful face in England.'

Patricia Medina, who was born in Liverpool, England, but came to Hollywood after the end of World War II, was the widow of actor Joseph Cotten.

The beloved actress's last film role, according to IMDB, was in the film El llanto de los pobres in 1978, but she had a long, successful career of leading roles in movies including 1950's Fortunes of Captain Blood 1952's Lady in the Iron Mask, and 1956's Stranger at My Door.

Born July 9, 1919, as one of three sisters, Medina began acting as a teenager in the 1930s, then headed to Hollywood after she started getting bigger roles in the mid-1940s, according to IMDB. It was then that she teamed up with Louis Hayward and broke into the movie biz as a new, vuluptuous beauty.

Before marrying Cotten, best known for his role in Citizen Kane she was married for 10 years to actor Richard Greene.

In 1947, Patricia Medina told the Times about her start in Hollywood:

In England I was nearly always cast as someone of mysterious origin, not too clearly designated but probably from some Southern European country ... Here they decided in my first film, 'The Secret Heart,' that I should be a Yankee. In my second I'm definitely English. It's all rather confusing, I must say.

The Times reported that Medina has no immediate survivors.