Early life Del Puerto was born Elisabeth von Hortenau, in
Vienna,
Austria, the daughter of Charlotte Helene Beer and Alfred Joseph von Hortenau, a cavalry officer in the
Austro-Hungarian Army and
illegitimate son of the
Archduke Otto Francis of Austria. Her parents divorced when she was two years old.
Acting and modeling career At four she made her stage debut under the guidance of
Isadora Duncan and her grandmother Maria Schleinzer who was a
vedette at the
Vienna Court Opera. She attended the
Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, Italy, with
Alida Valli and other stars of the 1930s. After a short career on
Broadway, she went to Mexico, where she modeled for a department store and appeared in 17 films, becoming a star of the
Golden Age of Mexican cinema of the 1940s and 1950s.
Other careers After retiring from films, she worked for
Time Life magazines and in advertising and public relations in New York. She owned and cooked for five gourmet restaurants, among them El Cuchitril, a famous bistro in the
Zona Rosa,
Mexico City. She was working on her fifth book (a novel set in the early 1900s). One of her oeuvres is a semi-fictitious biography called
My Way, two are detective stories: "The Key" and "The Portrait" and one is a book for children,
Sonia, which she hoped to have illustrated and published. She had a real estate license, selling properties in Mexico and the United States.
Later life In her last years, Isabel resided in
San Antonio, Texas, with her three dogs that had been picked up as strays. She actively supported the
Democratic Party and headed a charity that was trying to help homeless people and their pets. On 13 March 2014, she died of an
embolism at 6:30 p.m. after a brief hospitalization, surrounded by her son Joe, and daughter Kat. == Filmography ==