“Lynch Girl” and Countess Von Bismarck: the 60th birthday of Laura Harring, the 'femme fatale' of Mulholland Drive

When she received a call from David Lynch's assistant, assuring her that the celebrated film director wanted to meet with her immediately, Laura Harring didn't even have a representative.

After more than a decade trying to earn a place in the mecca of the seventh art, with a couple of roles in television soap operas as the highest professional milestone, the Mexican's hopes of becoming a star had been relegated.

“I had already given up on Hollywood,” she confessed.

“I was doing theater and something very experimental,” using a euphemism to confirm that she did not charge a single dollar for her work.

But Lynch had seen her face among hundreds of portraits of actresses and, without caring about the performer's weak resume, he decided that she would be the protagonist of his next project.

Harring was so excited about the opportunity that was opening up to her that, on the way to the director's offices, he rammed her car into another vehicle.

“When his assistant told me that the script began with my character driving and having a traffic accident, I got chills.”

The actress with David Lynch in 2001.Pool BENAINOUS/DUCLOS (Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

A couple of years later, Harring not only already had a representative but was walking like a diva on the red carpet at the Cannes festival.

had just seen the light of day and, although it had not yet reached its current status as an absolute cult classic, named by media such as the BBC as the best film of the century so far, its protagonist was compared to myths of golden Hollywood such as Ava Gardner or Rita Hayworth, whose name her character also borrows in the film.

The press dedicated all kinds of covers and labels – “Latina bomb”, “femme fatale”, “sex-symbol” – to this explosive amnesiac woman who is physically and emotionally rescued by the aspiring actress played by Naomi Watts.

Both proved wrong the ABC executives who scrapped the

pilot – yes, it was originally going to be a series – because its protagonists, in their early thirties, “were too old to be television stars.” .

Harring took the opportunity to shine at the film festival and won over the photographers by pulling off her miss tricks: she took off her jacket, showed off her curves in a suggestive denim top and left the mark of her red lips on Lynch's face.

"When we left the journalists began to applaud and chant my name in unison: 'Laura, Laura, Laura!'

So I came back, raised my arms and blew them a kiss.

They roared excitedly.

The president of the festival told me: 'Where have you been all these years?'" recalls the actress.

Her charismatic presence had completely overshadowed the presence of her co-star, so, during dinner, she took Watts' hand and made a prediction.

“I told her, 'Naomi, things always turn around and the sun will shine on your shoulders one day.

And she did.”

More than twenty years after that, Laura Elena Martínez Harring, who is now celebrating her 60th birthday, is well aware that David Lynch's masterpiece has already guaranteed her a privileged place in cinematographic immortality.

Despite having worked constantly during the last decades, especially on the small screen and in films such as Love in the Time of Cholera or John Q, the artist from Sinaloa never again achieved the level of impact obtained with Lynch's film.

She's probably never going to overcome the label of being 'the brunette of

', something that Naomi Watts did, but she seems to be at peace with it.

“I have already left my mark in Hollywood, I am part of a classic.

“I would never even have to work again,” she said in The Independent in 2017. Harring, who has made only one film in the last five years, announced her retirement from acting just a month ago.

“It has been a wonderful life and career.

I appreciate every crew member, actor, director and producer of all my films and series.

There will always be a place in my heart for you.

“I am retired but not dead, there is still a lot to live,” she wrote on her Instagram account.

On that same social network she shares daily advice on personal and spiritual development, declaring herself a follower of yoga, cosmic healing and other personal growth formulas such as manifestation.

Laura Harring at the premiere of "Blonde" last year in California.Jon Kopaloff (Getty Images)

Perhaps Harring can take advantage of this new time away from the sets to write the first pages of a biography that seems exciting.

The daughter of a farmer and a psychotherapist, her family immigrated to Texas when she was just a child.

At the age of 12, she was a collateral victim of a shooting that occurred in the parking lot of some movie theaters, receiving a bullet impact to her head that, by just a few millimeters, missed her brain.

Shortly after her, her parents sent her to board an exclusive Swiss school and, after graduating from it, she went to volunteer in India to help the most disadvantaged.

Upon her return to the United States, she decided to enter a beauty pageant in her city of residence, El Paso, motivated by the opportunity to travel throughout the country.

She won that contest and a few others.

She was Miss El Paso, Miss Texas and, finally, Miss USA in 1985, becoming the first Latina to achieve the title.

That was her catapult into the world of acting.

Simultaneously, and at only 18 years old, Ella Harring married Count Carl von Bismarck, great-great-grandson of whom she was chancellor and architect of the unity of Germany.

Confronted by the young woman's professional future – he did not want her to work – they divorced two years later.

Laura Harring has since maintained the title of countess, but she has not passed through the altar again.