Míriam Colón Valle (August 20, 1936 – March 3, 2017) was a Puerto Rican actress. She was the founder and director of New York City's Puerto Rican Traveling Theater. Beginning her career in the early 1950s, she performed on Broadway and on television. She appeared on television programs from the 1960s to the 2010s, including Sanford and Son and Gunsmoke. She is best known as Mama Montana, the mother of Al Pacino's title character in Scarface. In 2014, she received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. She died of complications from a pulmonary infection on March 3, 2017, at the age of 80. Early life Míriam Colón Valle was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, on August 20, 1936. In the 1940s, her recently divorced mother moved the family to a public housing project called Residencial Las Casas in San Juan. She attended Román Baldorioty de Castro High School in Old San Juan, where she took part in plays. Her first drama teacher, Marcos Colón (no relation) believed in her talent, and helped her gain permission to observe the students in the drama department of the University of Puerto Rico. She was a good student in high school and was awarded scholarships to the Dramatic Workshop and Technical Institute and Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio in New York City. In New York, she befriended Dean Zayas, another young Puerto Rican actor and future director. Career In 1953, Colón debuted as an actress in Los Peloteros (The Baseball Players), a film produced in Puerto Rico, starring Ramón "Diplo" Rivero, and in which she played a character called Lolita. That year, she moved to New York City, where she was accepted by Actors Studio co-founder Elia Kazan after a single audition, thus becoming the studio's first Puerto Rican member. In New York, she worked in theater and later landed a role on the soap opera Guiding Light. She attended a performance of René Marqués' La Carreta (The Oxcart) which motivated her to form the first Hispanic theater group, with the help of La Carreta's producer, Roberto Rodríguez, called "El Circuito Dramático". In 1954, she appeared on stage in "In The Summer House" at the Play House in New York City. Between 1954 and 1974, she made guest appearances in television shows such as Peter Gunn and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. She appeared mostly in westerns such as Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The High Chaparral,