Jesús Franco facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Jesús Franco
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Franco at the 2008 Fantastic'Arts festival, Gérardmer, France
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Jesús Franco Manera
12 May 1930 Madrid, Spain
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| Died | 2 April 2013 (aged 82) Málaga, Spain
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| Occupation | Director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, musician, composer, actor, editor |
| Years active | 1954–2013 |
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| Children | Caroline Riviere (stepdaughter from first marriage) |
Jesús Franco Manera (12 May 1930 – 2 April 2013) was a Spanish filmmaker, composer, and actor, known as a prolific director of low-budget exploitation and B-movies. In a career spanning from 1959 to 2013, he wrote, directed, produced, acted in, and scored approximately 173 feature films, working both in his native Spain and (during the rule of Francisco Franco) in France, West Germany, Switzerland and Portugal. Additionally, during the 1960s, he made several films in Rio de Janeiro and Istanbul.
Biography
Of Cuban and Mexican parentage, Franco was born in Madrid and studied at the city's Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográficas and the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris. He began his career in 1954 (aged 24) as an assistant director in the Spanish film industry, performing many tasks including composing music for some films as well as co-writing a number of the screenplays. He assisted directors such as Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent, León Klimovsky and Juan Antonio Bardem. After working on more than 20 films for other directors, he decided to get into directing films himself in 1959, making a few musicals and a crime drama called Red Lips.
In 1960, Franco took Marius Lesoeur and Sergio Newman, two producer friends, to a cinema to see the newly released Hammer horror film The Brides of Dracula and the three men decided to go into the horror film business. His career took off in 1962 with The Awful Dr. Orloff (a.k.a. Gritos en la noche), which received wide distribution in the United States and the UK. Franco wrote and directed Orloff, and even supplied some of the music for the film. In the mid-1960s, he went on to direct two other horror films, then proceeded to turn out a number of James Bond-like spy thrillers.
Although he had some American box office success with Necronomicon - Geträumte Sünden (1968), 99 Women (1969) and two 1969 Christopher Lee films – The Bloody Judge and Count Dracula – he never achieved wide commercial success. Many of his films were only distributed in Europe, and most of them were never dubbed into English.
Legacy
Jesus Franco (or Jess Franco) sometimes worked under various pseudonyms, including David Khune and Frank Hollmann. A fan of jazz music (and a musician himself), many of his pseudonyms were taken from jazz musicians such as Clifford Brown and James P. Johnson.
Franco was known for his use of a hand-held camera and zoom shots, which he felt lent realism to his films.
His main claim to fame, however, is that he managed to direct approximately 173 motion pictures in his lifetime, encompassing a wide swath of different genres with practically no financial backing available to him.
Death
Franco suffered a severe stroke on 27 March 2013, and was taken to a hospital in Málaga, Spain, where he died six days later, on the morning of 2 April. He was 82.
See also
In Spanish: Jesús Franco para niños
