Paul Naschy | |
---|---|
Born | Jacinto Molina Álvarez September 6, 1934 Madrid, Spain |
Died | November 30, 2009 Madrid, Spain | (aged 75)
Occupation(s) | Actor, film director, screenwriter |
Spouse |
Elvira Primavera (m. 1969) |
Children | 2 |
Jacinto Molina Álvarez (September 6, 1934 – November 30, 2009)[1] known by his stage name Paul Naschy, was a Spanish film actor, screenwriter, and director working primarily in horror films. His portrayals of numerous classic horror figures—The Wolfman, Frankenstein's monster, Count Dracula, Quasimodo, Fu Manchu and a mummy—earned him recognition as the Spanish Lon Chaney.[2] Naschy also starred in dozens of action films, historical dramas, crime films, TV shows and documentaries. He also wrote the screenplays for most of his films and directed a number of them as well, signing many of them "Jacinto Molina". Naschy was bestowed Spain's Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts in 2001.[3]
Naschy was born as Jacinto Molina Alvarez in Madrid in 1934, and grew up during the Spanish Civil War, a period of great turmoil in Spanish history. His father Enrique Molina was a successful furrier, and Naschy grew up in very comfortable surroundings, at one point living in his parents' country mansion. Naschy went to college initially to become an architect. After college, he started out as a professional weightlifter, but soon gravitated to acting and filmmaking.[4] His favorite film character from childhood was the Wolf Man, dating back to when he saw the classic Universal film Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) as a child. At times, he tried his hand at designing record album covers, writing pulp western novels and drawing comic book stories, but did not meet with much success. In his 20s, Naschy moved back and forth between professional weightlifting and acting, but wasn't able to secure important roles, usually obtaining just bit parts.
Naschy had an uncredited bit part in the classic 1961 Biblical epic King of Kings and the experience drew him further into filmmaking. Naschy also played uncredited bit parts in the following films: El Principe Encadenado / The Chained Prince (1960, a.k.a. King of the Vikings, playing a Mongol chieftain); Operation Plus Ultra (1966, playing a masked surgeon); Las Viudas / The Widows (1966, acting as assistant director in the "Luna de Miel" segment only); and La Esclava del Paraiso / Slave of Paradise (1968, a.k.a. 1001 Nights, playing a palace servant named Chantal). Naschy allegedly acted as an assistant director on two other films, Aventura en el Palacio Viejo (1967) and Cronica de Nueve Meses (1967)[5]
While appearing as an extra in an episode of the American TV show I Spy that was being filmed in a remote country site in Spain in 1966, Naschy met horror icon Boris Karloff on the set, a thrill he never forgot. (Karloff was in a very poor mood that day, apparently depressed and in poor health. This encounter led to a posthumously produced film biography on Naschy being entitled Paul Naschy: The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry.)
In 1968, at age 34, he wrote a screenplay for a werewolf movie entitled The Mark of the Wolfman (about a Polish werewolf named Count Waldemar Daninsky) and managed to interest a Spanish film company called Maxper Producciones Cinematograficas into financing it. Naschy never intended to play "El Hombre Lobo" (as the doomed lycanthrope came to be called in Spain), he just wound up with the part when the producer could not find a suitable actor (they had tried to hire Lon Chaney Jr., but at age 62, the fabled Hollywood horror star was far too sickly to travel).
The German distributors insisted he change his name from Jacinto Molina because it sounded too Spanish, which would have hurt the film's chances at the box offices in various countries outside of Spain. He created the name "Paul Naschy".... "Paul" after Pope Paul VI, and "Naschy" as a Germanic sounding version of "Imre Nagy", one of Naschy's weightlifting idols. Naschy later wrote and starred in 11 sequels featuring his Waldemar Daninsky werewolf character, and spun off a very successful acting and screenwriting career in the process.
Naschy wrote the screenplays for most of the films he starred in, especially the horror movies. His most prolific year was 1972, during which time he wrote and starred in no less than seven movies.
During the 1970s, he worked for some of the best Euro-horror film directors in the business, including León Klimovsky, Carlos Aured, Javier Aguirre, José Luis Madrid, Juan Piquer Simón, Francisco Lara Polop and José Luis Merino. Naschy's favorite director was León Klimovsky, with whom he made eight horror and action films. Naschy praised Klimovsky's professional workmanlike attitude, but he always felt that Klimovsky rushed through the filming and never allowed for enough retakes that might have improved some of their films. He also enjoyed working for director Carlos Aured, and was proud of the films they did together. Naschy's favorite co-star (and co-oroducer) was Julia Saly, and he worked with her on fourteen of his films.
In 1976, he decided to try his hand at directing as well, choosing the costume drama Inquisition as his first project. He did well for about eight years, even producing and directing a number of successful Japanese/Spanish co-productions and made-for-Spanish-TV documentaries, but by 1985, his feature films were no longer breaking even, and after losing a lot of money on his ill-conceived spy spoof Operation Mantis (1985), Naschy's production company, Aconito Films, wound up in bankruptcy. (Aconito is the scientific term for the herb wolfsbane). Naschy had three partners in the company...Augusto Boue (who dumped Naschy and sold his shares in the business the moment things got bad), Masurao Takeda (who died soon after the bankruptcy from pancreatic cancer) and Julia Saly (who retired from acting completely after Mantis flopped).
On June 20, 1984, Naschy's father Enrique Molina died of a heart attack while fishing alone on the shores of a lake. Some boys playing in the woods discovered his body, too late to revive him.[6] The unexpected sudden loss of his father (with whom he had always been very close), coinciding with the bankruptcy of his film company, plunged Naschy into a two-year period of depression. Suddenly no one in the film industry wanted to finance projects with him, and some of his best friends turned their backs on him when he needed them the most. Naschy claimed in interviews that he even considered suicide during this period.
He only returned to filmmaking in 1987 with his supposed "comeback film" El Aullido del Diablo. Naschy's son Sergio played a major role in the film, along with famed horror icons Howard Vernon and Caroline Munro. The film was very poorly distributed unfortunately (shown only on local Spanish TV), and even today is still not available in English.
Naschy's career took a second downturn when he suffered a near-fatal heart attack himself on August 27, 1991, triggered by weightlifting in a local gym. He was hospitalized for more than a week, then had major heart surgery performed on September 5. A rumor circulated throughout horror film fandom that Naschy had died, since he disappeared from the film scene for a while after his operation. He had to later contact a number of fanzine publishers in various countries to inform them that he was still very much alive.
In 1996, Naschy wrote and starred in his 11th werewolf film Licántropo, which he thought would be a big comeback film for him, but the movie did not do well at all, critically or financially. He continued to appear in a number of low budget horror films and crime dramas, however, during the following decade, during which time he won a number of prestigious fan awards and appeared as a celebrated guest at many horror film conventions during the 1990s and the 2000s (both in the United States and in Europe). But he was still doing poorly financially, and complained bitterly in interviews about the state of the corrupt Spanish film industry which he said practiced favoritism and cronyism. In 1997, Naschy wrote a detailed autobiography entitled Paul Naschy: Memoirs of a Wolf Man[7] (which included his filmography as well).
Naschy even traveled to Hollywood briefly in 2003 to appear in two shot-on-video (adult content) horror films directed by Donald F. Glut and Fred Olen Ray, two former horror fans-turned-directors who must have treated him like royalty on the set. (Filming got a bit complicated due to a language barrier since Naschy had never learned to speak English. Also, Naschy had brought his wife and son Sergio along with him, and the day after they arrived, his wife was hospitalized with a stomach virus, so Naschy was a bit preoccupied during the shoot.) During his sojourn in Hollywood, Naschy even visited Universal Studios as well as the famed "Ackermansion" museum of Forrest J Ackerman, the editor of the legendary magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland.
Naschy died of pancreatic cancer on November 30, 2009, at a hospital in Madrid, Spain at the age of 75. He struggled desperately to stay alive for over one year after being diagnosed with the cancer in 2008, but the end was inevitable.[8] Although he ended his life in relatively poor financial straits, Naschy always received a tremendous outpouring of love from his many fans at the conventions he attended and died knowing he would always be regarded as a major horror film icon.[7]
Naschy was married only once, on October 24, 1969, to a woman named Elvira Primavera, the daughter of an Italian diplomat living in Spain. They were still happily married 40 years later at the time of his death. His wife was always very supportive of his filmmaking projects and was undoubtedly one of the factors that led to his success. He was survived by his widow Elvira and his two sons, Bruno and Sergio Molina.
A hardcover book entitled Muchas Gracias, Señor Lobo[9] was published in Germany after Naschy's death, collecting hundreds of rare photos, lobby cards, posters, etc. that had been used to promote Naschy's films over the decades in a number of different countries. A comprehensive film biography entitled Paul Naschy: The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry (a reference to Naschy's meeting Boris Karloff on the set of "I Spy" in 1966) has also been released on DVD.
The werewolf Count Waldemar Daninsky (known in Spain as El Hombre Lobo) is without a doubt Paul Naschy's most famous horror character, since he played Daninsky in 12 different films. In fact, Naschy holds the record for the greatest number of roles as a werewolf, easily beating out Lon Chaney Jr., who played a werewolf only seven times during his career (even counting his House of Terror (1960 film) and his appearance on Route 66 (TV series).)[10]
Unlike the Chaney Universal films, however, which formed a somewhat chronological storyline from picture to picture, Naschy's Daninsky films were not connected to each other plotwise. Each film was more or less a free-standing story that was not meant to relate to the other films in the series in the way the old Universal films did. Daninsky's lycanthropy had a different origin in each film (which many Naschy fans find confusing). This was probably for the best, however, since in the 1970s, Euro-horror films were often theatrically distributed in the U.S. several years after they were completed, and they probably would have all been released out of order anyway.
Naschy's only other recurring character was the villainous medieval warlock Alaric de Marnac (who appeared in Naschy's Horror Rises from the Tomb (1972) and returned to life again in a sequel, Panic Beats (1983)). Naschy claims he based this character on a real-life medieval nobleman named Gilles de Rais, a serial killer on whose life story Naschy also based the lead character in his 1974 film El Mariscal del Infierno (The Devil's Possessed)[11]
Naschy's 12 Hombre Lobo films are not a series in the strictest sense. They seem to be a collection of unrelated plotlines, but all of which involve a werewolf named Count Waldemar Daninsky. Both La Furia del Hombre Lobo (1970) and La Maldicion de la Bestia (1975) refer to an origin involving Waldemar's being bitten by a yeti (and there is a brief yeti reference in La Noche de Walpurgis (1970) as well), but the other films presented him with entirely different origin stories. The fact that these films have also been retitled by the various film distributors many times over the years only adds to the confusion. Despite the numerous plot inconsistencies and convoluted flashbacks, however, Naschy's Wolf Man series as a whole is still considered his most famous work by most of his many fans.[6] Only 11 of the 12 Hombre Lobo films actually exist today. Las Noches del Hombre Lobo (1968), which Naschy claimed was the 2nd film in the series, is considered a lost film today.
In order of production, the 12 Hombre Lobo films are as follows:
Naschy played generic werewolves in four other films that were not part of the Hombre Lobo series....
Note* - Paul Naschy starred in many other horror films that did not feature el Hombre Lobo, as well as a number of crime films, historical dramas, action thrillers, etc. Below is the complete list of all his movies, in strict chronological order of production.[6]
Naschy died on November 30, 2009, in Madrid, Spain.