film lessons
This March 11 the actor would have turned 100 years old. We review eight of his great films and take a look at ‘The Cabin’ by Mercero
This March 11 José Luis López Vázquez, one of the most popular Spanish actors of all time, would have turned 100 years old. He was born in Madrid on March 11, 1922, in front of the Doré Cinema, then known as ‘The Palace of the Pipes’, today the projection room of the Spanish Film Library. His destiny was written from his birth.
His career spans 262 titles, including movies and television series. He worked under the orders of the greatest directors of the moment. His comedies with Gracita Morales were enormously popular, but he was also one of the favorite actors in the comedies of Berlanga, Ferreri, Nieves Conde or Forqué. However, there is another López Vázquez, the one with his dramatic characters, who embroidered them with enormous wisdom, with Saura, Olea, Armiñán or the North American George Cukor. These are the highlights of it:
One of the most prestigious films by Carlos Saura, who was the first to see the dramatic qualities of López Vázquez. The actor was a doctor who becomes so obsessed with the foreign wife of his friend’s newlywed that he tries to change her nurse’s appearance so that he looks like her. A complex character, who he saves with ease.
Pedro Olea trusted López Vázquez to play a poor peddler who, in Galicia at the beginning of the 20th century, ends up being considered by everyone, including himself, as a werewolf. López Vázquez knew how to imprint a great humanity on the character. Years later, Olea offered him another dramatic role in ‘It’s not good that the man is alone’ (1972) as a shy and introverted man who has a relationship with a life-size doll.
1970
the garden of delights
Once again under Saura’s orders, the filmmaker chooses him to give life to an amnesiac man, whose family relives his childhood moments looking for him to recover his memory. López Vázquez composes an extraordinarily complex character, with a memorable performance as an almost expressionless man, who looks and understands nothing.
1971
My dear lady
It was Jaime de Armiñán who offered López Vázquez one of the milestones of his career, and his most complex character, that of Adela Castro, a mature lady from the provinces who, after undergoing surgery, becomes a man. The actor creates an impressive performance, first as a woman and then as a man. The film was nominated for an Oscar.
The great George Cukor, after seeing López Vázquez in ‘Mi querida senorita’, wanted him to be in this film, his foray into Hollywood cinema. López Vázquez is Dambreuse, a character who intervenes in one of the memories of the protagonist of the film. López Vázquez was able to continue working in Hollywood, but the actor, who did not speak English and who felt safer in his land, declined the offers he received.
In his directorial debut, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón wanted López Vázquez to be his main protagonist. The filmmaker already shows here his concern for language, present in many of his films. López Vázquez plays a language scholar who is on vacation in a forest where he finds a mute shepherdess. The actor fills his character with sensitivity, seeking to teach the shepherdess how to speak.
Here, Saura gives López Vázquez another of the roles of his life, that of Luis, a mature editor who goes to a town in Segovia to transfer his mother’s remains there. There he will meet again with the love of his childhood. Film about memory, family and lost childhood. The film was Jury Prize at Cannes.
1979
The truth about the Savolta case
Antonio Drove gave López Vázquez the character of Domingo ‘Pajarito’ de Soto, a journalist who witnessed the clashes between anarchist gunmen and hired assassins paid by the bosses in Barcelona between 1917 and 1923. Historical film of denunciation with a character betrayed by all.
Production made for television by Antonio Mercero that narrates the progressive anguish of a man who is trapped in a telephone booth. What at first seems like a mishap, turns into such a disturbing and terrifying situation. Magistral López Vázquez as the trapped man. The film won an Emmy Award.