Jose Ferrer was the first Puerto Rican and the first Hispanic actor to win an Academy Award for Best Actor. His 1950 performance as Cyrano de Bergerac, the large-nosed, poetic swordsman who loves a woman he believes could never love him back, required him to fence, declaim verse, and convey heartbreak under layers of prosthetic makeup. He made it look effortless. Born Jose Vicente Ferrer de Otero y Cinton in San Juan on January 8, 1912, he moved to New York at six and was educated at Princeton, where he studied architecture before switching to the stage. He made his Broadway debut at 23 and quickly became one of the most versatile actors in American theater. His Iago in a 1943 production of Othello, opposite Paul Robeson, was so precisely malevolent that critics compared him to the great classical actors of the English stage. Hollywood gave him character roles. He won the Oscar for Cyrano in 1951, then delivered a completely different performance as the painter Toulouse-Lautrec in Moulin Rouge two years later, walking on his knees for much of the film to portray the artist's disability. He directed as well as acted, staging and starring in both stage and screen productions with a restless energy that kept him moving between media. He was vocal about the discrimination Latino actors faced in a white-dominated film industry. Hollywood routinely cast white actors in Hispanic roles while offering Latin actors servants and bandits. Ferrer challenged this openly and paid a price for it: the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated him during the Red Scare, partly because his political outspokenness made him a target. He worked steadily for five decades, appearing in over sixty films, including Lawrence of Arabia, The Caine Mutiny, and Dune. He won three Tony Awards on Broadway. He died on January 26, 1992, at 80. His Oscar remains a landmark: the first time the Academy recognized a Latino performer as the best in his profession.