José Luis López Vázquez obituary (original) (raw)

The Spanish actor José Luis López Vázquez, who has died aged 87, was so much a part of Spanish cinema for six decades, appearing in almost 250 films between 1948 and 2007, that it seems inconceivable without him. Short and bald, with a little moustache, bearing a certain resemblance to Groucho Marx, he often embodied the average Spaniard. "I was an insignificant person, and I stayed that way," López explained.

As most of López's career was synchronous with Francisco Franco's 36-year repressive regime, when it was almost impossible for Spain to create a vibrant film industry and for talented film-makers to express themselves freely, the majority of his films were conveyor-belt comedies and melodramas, strictly for home consumption. Nevertheless, in the 1950s and 60s, despite restrictions, a distinctive Spanish art cinema managed to emerge, led primarily by the directors Juan Antonio Bardem, Luis García Berlanga and Carlos Saura, and the screenwriter Rafael Azcona. López played important roles in a dozen films by Berlanga and four by Saura – many of them written by Azcona – which gained international attention.

Born in Madrid of working-class parents, he was brought up by his mother after his father abandoned the family. "We were very poor – my mother earned three pesetas a day – but I never felt any resentment. I was a very independent child," López recalled. A gifted painter, he was forced to give up his studies to earn a living and joined a Falangist youth theatre as a set decorator and costume designer, though he was not political. Called upon to replace an actor one evening, he was so impressive that he was asked to continue acting and, at 17, joined a theatre troupe led by the actor Conchita Montes.

In film he began as a costume designer and assistant director, while playing bit parts. However, his comic talent soon became apparent and he began to get bigger roles. After more than 20 films in eight years, López was given the chance to be appreciated abroad for the first time, thanks to the Italian director Marco Ferreri during Ferreri's two-year sojourn in Spain.

El Pisito (The Little Flat, 1958) was an anti-bourgeois black comedy centred on a timid, middle-class man – López, perfecting his dazed and lost look – who marries a crotchety, dying octogenarian in order to inherit her apartment and eventually marry his fiancee of 12 years.

Ferreri's El Cochecito (The Wheel-chair, 1959), was a sardonic study of geriatric revolt in which an elderly but fit man becomes obsessed by the desire to own a motorised wheelchair like those of his disabled friends, one of whom is drolly played by López. Both films, adapted by Azcona from his novels, were oblique critiques of Franco's totalitarian regime. So too were Berlanga's savage satires, Plácido (1961) and El Verdugo (The Executioner, 1962). López played a photographer in the former, a mocking portrait of officialdom and Christian charity, and a tailor in the latter. Plácido won him one of 15 best actor awards during his long career.

López revealed his ability to play drama in the films of Saura, beginning with Peppermint Frappé (1968), in which he portrayed a doctor becoming obsessively infatuated with his brother's attractive wife, with tragic consequences. He is superb as a man whose disturbed mind falls prey to illusions as a result of his repressed religious upbringing.

In Saura's The Garden of Delights (1970), López is compelling as a ruthless tycoon, catatonic and paralysed in a wheelchair after a car accident, who holds the key to his family's fortune. Even better was his sensitive performance in Saura's Cousin Angelica (1973), 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. Also in 1973, he made the notable thriller No Es Bueno Que el Hombre Esté Solo (It Is Not Good for Man to Be Alone), as a widowed man living with a life-size doll whose secret is discovered by a new neighbour.

In 1972 López made 11 films, including tour-de-force performances in Mi Querida Señorita (My Dearest Senorita), in which he plays a woman who discovers that "she" is a man; and in La Cabina, a 35-minute film made for television, as a man trapped in a telephone box. In the same year, he was seen in George Cukor's Travels With My Aunt, as Maggie Smith's wealthy former French lover. He continued to appear with great regularity in films and TV, notably in La Escopeta Nacional (1978), La Patrimonio Nacional (1981) and Nacional III (1982), Berlanga's wry trilogy about the Leguineches, an impoverished aristocratic family.

López, who is survived by his fourth wife and four children (two each from his second and third marriages), was awarded the gold medal for fine arts by the Spanish government in 1985.