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A major presence in California filmmaking of the mid-1910s, dark-haired, exotic-looking Beatriz Michelena came to the screen from Grand Opera. In 1914, Michelena was made the focal point of the California Motion Picture Corp., a concern founded by some of the state's most notable businessmen. Located at San Raphael, CA, near San Francisco, California specialized in adaptations of literary classics and its initial release, Salomy Jane (1914), from Bret Harte's novel and starring Michelena in the domineering title role, proved a major success that briefly established Northern California as a viable alternative to Los Angeles. Michelena then played Lovey Mary in a screen version of Anne Crawford Flexner's popular play Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1914) and was Goethe's Mignon (1915). But she was mainly popular in outdoor melodramas filmed on location in the Sierras: A Phyllis of the Sierras (1915), The Woman Who Dared (1916), The Heart of Juanita (released 1919), Just Squaw, and others, most of them directed by her husband, actor/writer George Middleton. According to at least one report, Michelena and Middleton had left the financially strapped California in November 1916 after refusing to complete a screen version of Faust without compensation. She never filmed again.