Celebrity Biographies
Angelino Fons
Veteran filmmaker Angelino Fons was a specialist in literary adaptations. He started out strong, although he later allowed himself to be seduced by the siren songs of the most commercial cinema of the Transition. Still, he has some titles of enormous interest to his credit. The man responsible for a great adaptation of Fortunata y Jacinta (with Emma Penella) and co-writer of La caza died in Madrid on June 7, 2011, at the age of 75 as a result of heart problems that he had suffered for some time.
Born on March 6, 1936, a few months before the outbreak of the Civil War, in the capital of Spain, Angelino Fons Fernández belonged to a family with Levantine roots. He spent the first months of his life as a refugee with his family at the French Lyceum, since his father, a doctor, was owed a favor by the French ambassador.
At the end of the war, he had to wear crutches during a period of convalescence, due to a heart murmur. To pass the time, he decided to go to the movies every day, which awakened his vocation for cinema. After enrolling in Romance Philology at the University, he abandoned these studies to become a student at the Institute for Cinematographic Research and Experiences (IIEC), in the same class as Antonio Mercero . Passionate about literature, he had the writer Fernando Sánchez Dragó as a college classmate, who also tried to enter the IIEC without success.
After several shorts, one of his professors at the IIEC, Carlos Saura , called him to collaborate with him on the script for La caza , which ended up being one of the emblematic films of late Francoism. He also wrote Peppermint Frappé and Stress is three, three for him .
Angelino Fons reconciled his two great passions, cinema and literature, in his first feature film as a director, La busca , an impeccable adaptation of the novel with which Pío Baroja opened the trilogy “The fight for life”. And although he shot a musical by-product, Cantando a la vida , at the service of Massiel, fashionable after winning Eurovision, Angelino Fons returned to literary adaptations with Fortunata y Jacinta , a great adaptation of the novel by Benito Pérez Galdós that also gave rise to ten years later to a perhaps better-known television series.
After the little-known La primera entrega de una mujer casada , she returned to the Galdós universe with Marianela , starring Rocío Dúrcal .
At this point, Fons’ career seemed to be going uphill, but in the mid-’70s it began to decline. He shot the failed Marriage Separation , with a script by the bizarre Carlos Pumares , My son is not what he seems , a musical comedy with very little charm with Celia Gámez and Esperanza Roy , By profession: polygamous , signing up for the naughty cinema of the time, and Emilia. .. stop and inn , a failed adaptation of the novel by Carmen Martín Gaite , which exploited the naked body of Ana Belén .
Lastly, he hit rock bottom with El Cid Cabreador , his latest film, an unstoppable historical comedy, conceived as an imitation of the formula of Christopher Columbus, ex officio… discoverer , which Mariano Ozores shot the previous year , just as bad, but with much more grace.
Subsequently, Fons occasionally filmed television episodes –one of La huella del crimen and another of Crónicas urbanas– , and some programs such as Vivir cada día . He also wrote a book like “Don Quixote and the cinema”.