Of all the characters that Spanish cinema has given, none so decisively
empty in its gravity
, existentially deep in its sadness and even adverbially and ontologically (with 'o', not with 'a') as close to the contradiction of living as Cascales ;
that is, like Enrique San Francisco.
The actor who played the only character without a character that has ever existed - that was Cascales in
Amanece que es no poco
(1988) - has died, according to the magazine
Hello!
at 65 years of age due to pneumonia and the cinema and a good part of television and theater are left orphans, in order, of: a) the most genuinely hoarse and punished voice, b) the closer look at Marty Feldman for these payments, c) the last survivor of the moment as glorious as it is dark lived by the cinematography of the Transition: the quinqui instant, d) the only ex-legionary with interpretive abilities, e) the comedian who did not need to finish any of his Jokes (they ran out on their own), f) the greatest of the lazy conscious and even proud of his grace and g) the character without a character who, because he had no wardrobe, had no wardrobe: Cascales.
It was all that and, for that of taking his nihilism to the extreme perhaps, a
Vox voter
, the only Vox voter on the other side of the screen.
Quite a gift, without a doubt, for any interviewer with little or no scruples.
That there are.
Reviewing his career, however, has little to do with his carefully crafted fame of lack of appetite.
He was born in Madrid, but soon moved to Barcelona.
There he lived with his mother and stepfather, who gave him the surname.
He would meet his father,
Vicente Haro,
at the age of 17 after adolescence and early youth of shooting from pension to pension in Madrid.
In one of his last television interviews, he confessed how the meeting with his father was.
In a bar and without any introduction.
The clarity of the blue eyes was enough.
At just six years old, he would make his debut in the public and in a film as cursed as it is emblematic: '
Different
', by
Luis María Delgado
.
There are starts that last forever.
With eight he already appeared in a montage of '
A Midsummer Night's Dream
' and with 10 his face was seen on TV in '
Santi, hotel bellboys'.
Until attending his baptism of fire at the hands of
Fernando Fernán Gómez
in 1975, the life of San Francisco submerged a few meters below common sense.
Always on the edge and always determined to avoid quick definitions.
Sniper he said that he became in the very Legion, the Spanish one, not the foreign one.
It is not clear if sooner or later he came to know the
prisons of Nepal
for fighting with a very sacred monkey.
And so.
In '
El picaro'
, that was the name of the series that consecrated him and even probably condemned him, it is where San Francisco acquired the gifts, the presence and even the myth that would haunt him to the bottom of himself.
Confused to the depths of his character, reality and fiction found in his slim body the exact place to live forever.
And so on until he touched the glory, the glory of hell, with '
Navajeros
' (1980), '
La mujer del Ministro'
(1981), '
Colegas
' (1982) and '
El pico
' (1983).
Eloy de la Iglesia,
he was the director of all of them, introduced him and sponsored him like so many others on the dark side of fiction and reality.
The quinqui cinema has in it an essential figure in its perfect reading of that other Spain that never appeared in the official photo of the Transition.
To the list we should add '
Maravillas
' (1981), by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón.
That is what refers to the cinema, outside the sets and, as he was almost forced to repeat in each interview in which chaos, he began to know
heroin and everything else.
I said, the 80s have in him his best test.
And even hurt.
What follows is a career through which the best possible reading of Spanish cinema can be made to a large extent.
He was always there and always as a
mandatory secondary
, as a
flat-stealing
supporting
actor,
as an essential figure in which the viewer took a second to recognize himself.
'Orquesta Club Virginia
' (1992), by Manuel Iborra;
'
Acción mutatante'
(1993), by Álex de la Iglesia;
'
Tirano Banderas'
(1995), by José Luis García Sánchez;
'
La ley de la frontera
' (1995), by Adolfo Aristarain;
'
Belmonte
' (1995), by Juan Sebastián Bollaín, or '
París-Tombuctú
' (1999), by Luis García Berlanga, are some of the most striking milestones of a curriculum that lasts until yesterday as the essential Tinín in '
Cuéntame how it happened
'from 2001 to 2008.
In his biography, marked in red is the motorcycle accident that left him in a wheelchair in 2002. A
self-confessed and probably confused biker
, a car hit him from behind and he was about to flee forever after an 11-hour operation.
He recovered in time to laugh at the moment when, upon renewing his DNI a little later, the police identified him as the accidental protagonist of a
search and arrest
warrant
.
"They didn't stop me because the chair didn't fit in the van," he was heard saying.
And so.
And as a place of exception, we return to the beginning, Cascales.
It is no coincidence that in his appearances in the no less mythical '
One, two, three ... answer again
' hers was the brief role of
aspiring casting
.
Already there he did nothing more than insist on the inglorious glory of the character who by dint of being nothing ends up being all at once.
Always determined to change the role to anyone.
Cascales is the one whose only wish is to flee from himself to get into the skin and role of someone else.
You don't like yours.
And so he lets the viewer know that, the truth is, he should not have reason to be satisfied with what life has given him.
Nobody has them.
First he tries it with the sabbatical year teacher, then with the mulatto catechumen and, finally, knowing that he is an easy prey, with the suicide.
San Francisco always, in his own way, was fleeing from himself.
Against everything and against everyone.
Until the end and wherever: in '
El hormiguero
' or in
Vox's
'
hornet's
nest
'
.
And yes, it was a couple of Rosario Flores.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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