López Vázquez, José Luis

(1922- 2009)

   Like many actors of his generation, López Vázquez started as a supporting player, was prolific in a long series of commercial films typical of Spanish production during the 1960s, and when he found the opportunity to prove his talent, he evolved into more serious roles.

   His first vocation was stage and costume design. He also did some theater work before being called in 1954 by Luis G. Berlanga for a supporting part in ¡Novio a la vista! (Fiancée Approaching! 1953).

   He was featured as a regular presence, consistently displaying a very characteristic high-pitched voice, and pedantic pronunciation and rhythms, in some of Berlanga's most famous films, such as Plácido (1962) and El verdugo (The Executioner, 1964), a collaboration that would continue into the 1990s (he played a priest in Todos a la cárcel [ Everybody to Jail, 1993 ], one of Berlanga's late films).

   During most of the 1960s, López Vázquez became one of the most popular comic actors in Spanish cinema and was extremely prolific, appearing in up to 12 films in one year (1967). He created the mask of a fawning, hypocritical, talkative, and emphatic civil servant, which became a recurring role. In 1960, he appeared for the first time with Gracita Morales (in Atraco a las tres [ Robbery at Three, José María Forqué, 1962 ]), and they ended up appearing together in 14 films, including a series of seven in which they starred between 1964 and 1968. They were a great comic couple, her dizziness playing well with his pedantry.

   Then, in 1967, his role in Carlos Saura's Peppermint Frappé (1967) as an immature adult obsessed with the young Geraldine Chaplin character, suggested depths to his acting that he had not yet been given the chance to probe. At this stage, he started alternating his well-rehearsed comic persona in desarrollismo and sexy comedies with extraordinarily detailed performances, like the one in Jaime de Armiñán's in Mi querida señorita (My Dear Miss, 1972). In this film, he plays a spinster in a provincial town who realizes "she" is actually a man. If the comic López Vázquez had always tended to be shrill and over the top, his roles in this film and in others that followed showed him underplaying effectively.

   In the 1970s, he gave substantial and very diverse performances in El bosque del lobo (The Forest of the Wolf, Pedro Olea, 1971); again combining the adult and the child in Carlos Saura's La prima angelica (Cousin Angelica, 1974); and as a gruff journalist in La verdad sobre el caso Savolta (The Truth About the Savolta Case, Antonio Drove, 1980). He also had a discreet international career, which included a supporting part in George Cukor's Travels with My Aunt (1972). He alternated film and theater, and won critical praise for his stage role of Willy Loman (in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman). During the Transition, he specialized in reactionary parts in comedies directed by old Franco regime figures like Rafael Gil and José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, but he also did less politically sensitive work for Berlanga in his Nacional series.

   From the early 1990s, López Vázquez slowed, doing mostly supporting work. He was a welcome presence in El largo invierno (The Long Winter, Jaime Camino, 1992), El maestro de Esgrima (The Fencing Master, Pedro Olea, 1992), and Luna de Avellaneda (Avellaneda Moon, Juan José Campanella, 2004). In his most recent role, ¿Y tú quién eres? (Do I Know You? Antonio Mercero, 2007), he plays a strong old man who helps a friend (played by Manuel Alexandre) overcome symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.

   Historical Dictionary of Spanish Cinema by Alberto Mira