Actor Manolo Zarzo dies at 93

There are as many ways to remember Manolo Zarzo as there are film (and theater and television) viewers, not only in Spain but throughout much of the world, as few actors are as well-traveled, as accomplished, with a deeper voice, whiter hair, and more forceful expression. In a recent interview with this same newspaper, he confessed that he had appeared in 127 films during his very long career; a career that began when he was just 16 and continued to the very limit of breath until his death on June 16 in Madrid. He said that he wrote down each of his works one by one in a notebook from the very beginning. His mother, he himself recounted on more than one occasion, dressed up the neighborhood children and had them act out stories she made up. A belief that the maestro, apparently, did not share. "One day he told my father: 'Make the kid a clown, no one can stand him,'" the actor recounted in the video documentary #MuchaVidaQueContar (#MuchaVidaQueContar ). And so it was, until he and his older sister Pepi joined the youth troupe Los Chavalillos de España, with which they toured the country for three years. "A new world for a kid from a working-class neighborhood," he commented in the same documentary.

It was thanks to this company that Antonio del Amo noticed him to play the "half-lame kid from Rastro who likes football"—his own words—in Día Tras Día (1951). That, at the age of 19, would be his first film, and that role sealed, in its own way and forever, a memorable chapter in the history of Spanish cinema. When, in 1960, Saura placed him at the center of Los Golfos (The Gulfs), Zarzo would become, perhaps unconsciously, the clearest image of a new way of understanding cinema. In this harsh portrait of an essentially harsh and censored Spain, he was the only professional actor or one with some experience in a film that, as an epigone of transalpine neorealism, proposed a true revolution. The film was at Cannes, won Buñuel over, and made its debuting director the last great reference for a cinema that wanted to be different. The line that connects Day After Day with The Scoundrels is, in effect, the line that separates the old from the new, the dictatorship that's threatened, or merely a dream, from something different. And in between, Zarzo. Forever.

But this, despite its relevance, is only one of the infinite ways to remember Manolo Zarzo. The pages of his booklet hide a universe; an entire universe as personal as it is shared. The youngest of a family of eight siblings, he would eventually become one of the essential figures in any cinema. And the list of directors with whom he eventually worked ranges from the populists of Mariano Ozores and Pedro Lazaga to the likes of Jaime de Armiñán, Juan Antonio Bardem, José Luis Garci, Mario Camus, and the aforementioned Saura. And Pedro Almodóvar. Such emblematic films as The Hive , The Holy Innocents , and Between Darkness appear in his booklet.

But not only that. Zarzo was, in his own way, an adventurer and a citizen of the world. When co-productions came along, he was the first. He filmed in France, Italy, and even in the Cambodian jungle ("I had a bad time there. I even removed 17 leeches from my leg with a cigarette," he commented). In Angola, he filmed with Ettore Scola. Will Our Heroes Manage to Find Their Friend Who Mysteriously Disappeared in Africa? (1968). The hero was Alberto Sordi, and Zarzo was the one tasked with helping him in his quest to find Nino Manfredi. Scola then took him to Italy to work with Marcello Mastroianni on The Jealousy Demon (1970).

And all this without counting his time on television, on everyone's television. He was Segismundo Ballester in Fortunata y Jacinta (1980), Bernardo Álvarez in Juncal (1989), Tomás Alberti in the first season of the series Compañeros (1998), Eugenio in El Súper (1999), Constantino in La verdad de Laura (2002), and Rafael in La Dársena de Poniente (2006). He's in everyone's notebook and memory.

A father of five, his life was not without accidents because, in its own way, the life of an actor is pure accident. In the tribute paid to him not long ago by the Film Academy, he recalled the day in September 1960 when he was heading to Puerta del Sol to get his passport stamped because he had to make a film in Italy. On the way, he came across a fire on the central Carretas Street and joined a group of people holding up blankets so the trapped victims could get down from the building. One of the young women who jumped was about to fall out of the blanket, and Zarzo stepped back to catch her. "I felt her weight fall on my shoulder. I was clinically dead for two hours and then with my torso in a cast for two months. I came out of that with determination. I told myself: 'I'm going to be okay,' and here I am."