By Danny Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — U.S. Senator from Alaka Lisa Murkowski has joined a nationwide chorus to win a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Ray Mala, the handsome Alaska Native movie star said to be the film industry’s first non-white leading man. His mother was an Inupiat Eskimo and his father was of Russian Jewish descent, according to a news release from Murkowski monitored here in Tawian
Mala, from the tiny village of Candle in northwest Alaska, died in 1952 at the age of 46. He worked in Hollywood with cinema greats Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. DeMille and others. Murkowski recently said on the Senate floor that he should be posthumously given a star, a long process that takes a detailed nomination process and a $30,000 fee. The list for 2012 has already been compiled, but there is a chance Mala could get the nod in 2013 or 2014,according to sources in Hollywood.
“It is a great honor for me to reflect upon the life of this inspirational Alaska Native icon, and to offer a tribute to his spirited and really very triumphant journey from small town village boy to silver screen leading man,” Murkowski said on the Senate floor. “Alaskans look forward to the day when Ray Mala’s magnificent star might be posthumously added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a tribute to the nation’s first ever Native American film star.”
Veteran Alaskan journalist Lael Morgan, author of Eskimo Star: From the Tundra to Tinseltown The Ray Mala Story, is working with Ted Mala,
Jr., Mala’s grandson, to get a star on the Walk of Fame. Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell has also issued a proclamation supporting the effort to win a star for Mala, according to his press office.
Mala’s long and ”improbable journey” to Hollywood took an important step when he filmed the last dog musher coming into Nome during the 1925 serum dog mushing
run that helped stop a diphtheria epidemic in its tracks. The footage helped him land a job at a major stuido in Hollywood — and the rest is cinema magic history!
In 1933, at the age of 27, Mala appeared in “Eskimo,” shot by MGM in the tiny Alaska village of Teller. MGM’s PR people dubbed it — are you ready? — “the biggest picture ever made.” The movie won an Oscar for film editing and made waves in Europe, where the film was called ”Mala the Magnificent”.
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Bloom is Taiwan bureau chief and a cyberspace beat reporter for San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com