José Luis López Vázquez de la Torre (11 March 1922 – 2 November 2009) was a Spanish actor, comedian, costume designer, scenic designer, and assistant director whose career spanned nearly seven decades. He was one of the most prolific and successful actors in Spain in the 20th century, starring in 262 films between 1946 and 2007. Internationally he was best known for his lead role in the surrealist horror telefilm La cabina (1972).
Born in Madrid of working-class parents, López Vázquez began his career on theatre in 1939 as a costume designer and set decorator before making his breakthrough as an actor. In the mid-1940s he switched over to film, where he continued his work in costume designs while serving as an assistant director. Throughout the 1950s he mostly played bit parts in the Spanish film industry, however, his comedic talent soon allowed him to get bigger roles, cultivating an image as Spain's on-screen everyman in numerous comedies during the Franco era and beyond. Around the 1960s he also revealed his ability to play dramatic roles.
At one point in his career he became part of a distinctive Spanish art cinema led primarily by directors Luis García Berlanga, Juan Antonio Bardem, Carlos Saura and screenwriter Rafael Azcona. He played important roles in several films by Berlanga (Plácido, 1961, El Verdugo, 1963, La escopeta nacional, 1978, Patrimonio nacional, 1981, Nacional III, 1982) and Saura (Peppermint Frappé, 1967, The Garden of Delights, 1970, Cousin Angelica, 1974), which gained international attention. He won two consecutives Best Actor awards at the Chicago International Film Festival for The Ancines Woods in 1971 and My Dearest Senorita in 1972. He had the opportunity to occasionally collaborate with renowned foreign filmmakers such as Marco Ferreri (El Pisito, 1959, El Cochecito, 1960) and George Cukor (Travels with My Aunt, 1972).
He was the recipient of numerous accolades, including four CEC Awards, two Fotogramas de Plata, two Sant Jordi Awards, two New York Latin ACE Awards, an Antena de Oro, and a TP de Oro. He earned the at the Valladolid International Film Festival in 1989, the Actors and Actresses Union Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000, the National Theatre Award in 2002, the Honorary Goya Award in 2004, and the in 2005. The Government of Spain honoured him with the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts in 1985 and the Gold Medal of Merit in Labour in 1997.
Early life José Luis López Vázquez was born in Madrid, Spain, on 11 March 1922. The only son of Margarita Vázquez de la Torre, a dressmaker, and Luis López, who worked as an official of the Ministry of Justice. In some biographies he appears as born on 12 March. "With the nerves of the event, my father forgot to register me and he did it the next day" he said. His father also forgot to give the official the name he chose for the baby. And he had to return to his brother José. The offices were already closed and they had to return a day later. He was registered with the nicknames of both. His parents separated when he was very young, causing them to go through difficulties and financial problems. As a teenager he was force to leave his studies and work as an administrative assistant and typist, a period that he began to overcome due to his ability in drawing and painting.
Career Early artistic work In 1939, at the age of 17, he became interested in theatre through the Youth Front and entered in the (TEU) directed by . There he outlined his vocation as a draughtsman thanks to the painter José Caballero, who had been part of the group La Barraca led by Federico García Lorca. He originally worked as a scenic designer for the sets of the Theatre of María Guerrero in times of Luis Escobar Kirkpatrick, as well as an assistant director to Pío Ballesteros and Enrique Herreros. The playwright and filmmaker José López Rubio had a decisive influence on his artistic side when he hired him as a costume designer for three films: It Happened in Damascus (1943), Eugenia de Montijo (1944) and Alhucemas (1948). Some of the theatrical productions for which he created costume designs in the 1940s and 1950s are Don Juan Tenorio, where he met Salvador Dalí in 1949, The Phantom Lady, The Village of Stepanchikovo, El caballero de Olmedo, La guardia cuidadosa, a drawing of Don Gil of the Green Breeches, and five sketches for the sets of Life Is a Dream, Y no subió a la cruz, and The Dog in the Manger.
Acting Film and television
In 1946, he made his film debut in Enrique Herreros' crime drama María Fernanda, la Jerezana. A few years later he began a long-time collaboration with director Luis García Berlanga, giving him a small role in the 1951 comedy That Happy Couple, co-directed by Juan Antonio Bardem. Shortly after, he made a part in Bardem's (1954), and Berlanga counted on him for two supporting roles in Boyfriend in Sight (1954), playing a nineteenth-century beach flirt, and Miracles of Thursday (1957), as a skeptical priest. He acted in many comedy films in these years, including Los tramposos (1959), directed by Pedro Lazaga, which showed the city of Madrid at the time and some of its most popular scams.
López Vázquez was given the chance to be appreciated abroad for the first time by the Italian director Marco Ferreri, with whom he shot his first starring role in El Pisito (1959), an anti-bourgeois black comedy based on a 1957 novel by screenwriter Rafael Azcona, which is centred on Rodolfo (López Vázquez), a timid, middle-class man who marries a crotchety, dying octogenarian to inherit her apartment and eventually marry his fiancee Petrita (Mary Carrillo). In addition he starred in the short film , a social critique with an anti-clerical point that was co-written by Berlanga and Azcona. The following year he appeared in Ferreri's El Cochecito (1960), with Pepe Isbert in the lead role in a sardonic study of geriatric revolt. The film won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Venice Film Festival. All these films were oblique critiques of Franco's totalitarian regime.
In the early 1960s he worked on two Berlanga's savage satires: Plácido (1961), nominated to the Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film in 1962, where López Vázquez shined in the role as Gabino Quintanilla, an event organizer without moral principles. His performance was acclaimed in the Sant Jordi Awards as Best Actor. And the classic Spanish film El Verdugo (The Executioner, 1963), playing an eccentric tailor who is brother of the main character (Nino Manfredi).Kepa Sojo. El Verdugo (El Verdugo), Luis García Berlanga (1963) , Nau Llibres, p. 38, 2016. ISBN 978-8416926008 He portrayed relevant comic roles such as the godfather in La gran familia (1962), and as Fernando Galindo, a bank clerk who plans a robbery of his own bank with the help of other employees in José María Forqué's comedy Atraco a las tres (Robbery at 3 o'clock, 1962). The character's quote "Fernando Galindo, un admirador, un amigo, un esclavo, un siervo" ("Fernando Galindo, an admirer, a friend, a slave, a servant") would become essential within Spanish culture. The movie co-starred the Spanish actress Gracita Morales, which he formed a popular partnership in such comedies as Pedro Lazaga's Sor Citroën (1967), and Mariano Ozores' Operation Mata Hari (1968). Together with Paco Martínez Soria he also stars in Lazaga's 1968 film , one of the most representative comedies of the construction boom in the 60s in Spain.
In 1967 he played his first dramatic role in Carlos Saura's psychological thriller Peppermint Frappé, as a physician becoming obsessively infatuated with his childhood friend's attractive wife (Geraldine Chaplin); he won the CEC Award for Best Actor awarded by the Círculo de Escritores Cinematográficos (Cinema Writers Circle) in 1968. Both comedy and drama, his performances were usually marked by solitary and repressed characters.Steven Marsh. Popular Spanish Film Under Franco: Comedy and the Weakening of the State, Springer, p. 24, 2005. ISBN 978-0230511873 Then he chained a series of major projects, starting when director Pedro Olea chose him for the lead role in the 1970 horror film El Bosque del Lobo (The Ancines Woods), in which he was the epilectic peddler Benito Freire (based on Spanish serial killer Manuel Blanco Romasanta), who, due a childhood trauma, periodically suffered from an irresistible urge to strangle women.Bryan Senn.The Werewolf Filmography: 300+ Movies., McFarland, 2017. ISBN 978-1-4766-2691-8 That performance earned him the Best Actor honour at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1971.Michael Kutza. Starstruck – How I Magically Transformed Chicago into Hollywood for More Than Fifty Years., BearManor Media, 2022. ISBN 978-1629339573 This was followed by Berlanga's 1970 black comedy Long Live the Bride and Groom, as a man about to get married when his mother appear dead in the pool shortly before the ceremony, and his second collaboration with Saura in The Garden of Delights (1970), as a ruthless tycoon, catatonic and paralysed in a wheelchair after a car accident, who holds the key to his family's fortune. His role was described by critic Roger Greenspun of The New York Times as "hilarious" and "pathetic" and even "terrifying".
By the 1970s he was a firmly established figure in Spanish cinema, appearing in eleven films in 1972, including Jaime de Armiñán's Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film-nominee My Dearest Senorita, which he would win the Best Actor Silver Hugo for a second year in a row at the Chicago Film Festival for his complex role as Adela Castro Molina/Juan, a woman who discovers that "she" is a man,Michael Kutza. Starstruck – How I Magically Transformed Chicago into Hollywood for More Than Fifty Years., BearManor Media, 2022. ISBN 978-1629339573 and Antonio Mercero's International Emmy Awards-winning television film La cabina, a psychological horror story about a man (López Vázquez) trapped in a telephone booth filmed by Televisión Española (TVE); López Vázquez won the Antena de Oro, the Fotogramas de Plata, and the Latin ACE Award for his performance. In this decade he participated in the international film productions The Legend of Frenchie King (1971), a western comedy directed by Christian-Jaque and starring Claudia Cardinale and Brigitte Bardot, and George Cukor's American comedy Travels with My Aunt (1972), which he co-starred opposite Dame Maggie Smith as M. Dambreuse, her wealthy former French lover. After the film was completed, Cukor invited him to Hollywood, proposing that he learn English to become a star, but López Vázquez declined the offer.
He collaborated again with Olea in the 1973 thriller No es bueno que el hombre esté solo, as a widowed man living with a life-size doll whose secret is discovered by a new neighbour (Carmen Sevilla). The same year he starred in Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón's drama Habla, mudita, as Ramiro, a linguist who is fascinated by a young mute shepherdess (Kiti Mánver). Later he performed in Saura's Cousin Angelica (1974), winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, in which he is a middle-aged bachelor who finds, on his return to Barcelona after many years away, that the cousin he loved as a child is now married to a fascist. Critic Vincent Canby said he was "super" in the part. He also played an old Antoni Gaudí in a 45-minute uneven film directed by John Alaimo that was unreleased until 2009 called (1974).Lorenzo J. Torres Hortelano. Helio San Miguel. World Film Locations: Barcelona, Intellect Books, pp. 40–41, 2013. ISBN 978-1783201075