Jose Luis Pellicena

Born in Zaragoza, on March 2, 1933, he began his medical career. But before finishing his degree, his mother died, which plunged him into serious emotional problems, everything indicates that he suffered a kind of depression that prompted him to leave the place where he had spent his childhood. After working for a year in Paris in a lamp parchment factory, he returned to his hometown, where he attended a life-changing performance at the Teatro Principal.

“My family had paid for a proscenium box and they had friends in the theater world,” he recalled in an interview. “And upon returning from Paris, the Lope de Vega company happened to be there, in which there were good friends of my family, such as Tamayo,  Manuel Dicenta  or  Mary Carrillo . They even came home. And I, who was still determined to leave Zaragoza at all costs, saw an open door in the company. So I signed up and went on tour with them, rather being silly, and that’s where it all started. But without the slightest vocation. Just to evade myself, out of the sheer need to escape.”

After productions such as “Diálogo de Carmelitas” and “Los años de baccalaureate”, he plays his first important role in “El diario de Ana Frank”, where he would meet the Argentine actress and later producer Olga Moliterno, his partner until his death, and the person who helped him the most to improve as an actor, and to prepare his roles. During the following years he starred in plays that made history on Madrid billboards, such as “Exercise for five fingers”, the first play to be performed in Spain by  Peter Shaffer, responsible for “Amadeus”, where he also participated, like Salieri. She made noise with “Contradanza”, where she played Elizabeth I of England, who according to the text by the Valencian Francisco Ors would have actually been a transvestite, but she also played numerous characters from the Golden Age classics.

“I never liked television. It didn’t appeal to me. I suppose that because theater is a living phenomenon, it happens there, in that unrepeatable and unique moment”, she affirmed. Even so, he achieved enormous popularity as the protagonist of the adaptation of “Crime and Punishment”, from the famous TVE  Novela program , in 1970. He also became a regular in another of the iconic spaces of the time,  Estudio 1 , where he appeared in several filmed versions of famous works. In  Don Quixote , directed in 1991 by  Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón , he played  Miguel de Cervantes himself .

He was not passionate about cinema either, but he did not give up filming, if the theater left him time. “They put the films there for me and I did them when the show was over, without further ado,” he confessed. Even so, he liked to remember his appearance in  Jaime de Armiñán ‘s film   En septiembre , where he gave life to a guy who meets his old friends He also appeared in titles such as  You can be a murderer , by  José María Forqué ,  Historias de la televisión , by  José Luis Sáenz de Heredia , and  Dragón Rapide , where the exiled politician José Calvo Sotelo was.