Paul Naschy

Naschy was born as Jacinto Molina Alvarez in Madrid in 1934, and grew up during the Spanish Civil War, a period of great turmoil in Spanish history. His father Enrique Molina (born in 1910) was a successful furrier, and Naschy grew up in very comfortable surroundings, at one point living in his parents' country mansion. Naschy went to college initially to become either a surveyor or an architect. After college, he started a career as a professional weightlifter, winning a number of prestigious awards, but soon gravitated to acting and filmmaking. His favorite film character from childhood was the Wolf Man, dating back to when he saw the classic Universal film Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) as a child. He attempted to design record album covers, write pulp western novels and draw comic books, but he did not meet with much success. In his 20s, Naschy moved back and forth between professional weightlifting and acting, but was unable to secure important roles, usually obtaining bit parts. Naschy had an uncredited bit part in the classic 1961 Biblical epic King of Kings and the experience drew him further into filmmaking. Naschy also played uncredited bit parts in the following films: El príncipe encadenado / The Prince in Chains (1960, a.k.a. King of the Vikings, shaving his head to play a Mongol chieftain); Operation Plus Ultra (1966, playing a masked surgeon); Las Viudas / The Widows (1966, hired as an assistant director in the "Luna de Miel" segment only); and La Esclava del Paraiso / 1001 Nights (1968 film) (1968, playing a palace servant named Chantal). Naschy allegedly acted as the assistant director on two other films, Aventura en el Palacio Viejo (1967) and Cronica de Nueve Meses (1967) In 1966, while appearing as an extra in an episode of the American TV show I Spy that was being filmed in a remote country site in Spain, Naschy met horror icon Boris Karloff on the set. (Karloff was in a very poor mood that day, noticeably depressed and in poor health.) This encounter led to a 2010 posthumously-produced biopic on Naschy being titled Paul Naschy: The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry. Horror Icon In 1968, at age 34, Naschy wrote a screenplay for a werewolf movie entitled The Mark of the Wolfman (about a Polish werewolf named Count Waldemar Daninsky) and managed to interest a Spanish film company called Maxper Producciones Cinematograficas into financing it. Naschy never intended to play "El Hombre Lobo" (as the doomed lycanthrope came to be called in Spain), but he wound up with the part when the producer could not find a suitable actor (they had tried to hire Lon Chaney Jr., but at age 62, the Hollywood horror star was unable to travel due to health issues). The German distributors insisted he change his name from Jacinto Molina because it sounded too Spanish, which would have hurt the film's chances at the box offices in various countries outside of Spain. He created the name "Paul Naschy".... "Paul" after Pope Paul VI, and "Naschy" as a Germanic sounding version of "Imre Nagy", one of Naschy's weightlifting idols. Naschy later wrote and starred in eleven sequels featuring his Waldemar Daninsky werewolf character, and spun off a successful acting and screenwriting career in the process. Naschy wrote the screenplays for most of the films he starred in, especially the horror movies. His most prolific year was 1972, during which time he wrote and starred in no less than seven movies. During the 1970s, he worked for some of the best European horror film directors in the business, including León Klimovsky, Carlos Aured, Javier Aguirre, José Luis Madrid, Juan Piquer Simón, Francisco Lara Polop and José Luis Merino. Naschy's favorite director was León Klimovsky, with whom he made eight films. Naschy praised Klimovsky's professional workmanlike attitude, but he always felt that Klimovsky never allowed for enough retakes that might have improved some of their films. He also enjoyed working for director Carlos Aured, and was proud of the films they did together. Naschy also always praised Spanish actor Eduardo Fajardo as being supportive of Naschy when he was down and out. Naschy's favorite co-star (and co-producer) was Julia Saly, and he worked with her on fourteen of his films. Career Downturn In 1976, he decided to try his hand at directing as well, choosing the costume drama Inquisition as his first project. He did well for eight years, even producing and directing a number of successful Japanese/Spanish co-productions and made-for-Spanish-TV documentaries, but by 1985, his feature films were no longer breaking even, and after losing a lot of money on his ill-conceived spy spoof Operation Mantis (1985), Naschy's production company, Aconito Films, wound up in bankruptcy. (Aconito is the scientific term for wolfsbane). Naschy had three partners in the company: Augusto Boue (who dumped his shares in the business when things got bad), Masurao Takeda (who died from pancreatic cancer soon after the bankruptcy) and Julia Saly (who retired from acting completely after Mantis flopped). On June 20, 1984, Naschy's father Enrique Molina died of a heart attack while fishing alone on the shores of a lake (he was 74). Some boys playing by the lake discovered his body in the woods, too late to revive him. The unexpected sudden loss of his father (with whom he had always been very close), coinciding with the bankruptcy of his film company, plunged Naschy into a two-year period of depression. No one in the film industry wanted to finance projects with him, and some of his best friends turned their backs on him when he needed them the most. Naschy claimed in interviews that he even considered suicide during this period. He only returned to filmmaking in 1987 with his supposed "comeback film" El Aullido del Diablo (The Howl of the Devil). Naschy wrote, directed and starred in the film along with his son Sergio and famed horror icons Howard Vernon and Caroline Munro. The film was very poorly distributed (shown only on local Spanish TV), and was broadly commercially unavailable until 2021, when Mondo Macabro released a restored version on blu-ray. Naschy's career took a second downturn when he suffered a near-fatal heart attack himself on August 27, 1991, triggered by weightlifting in a local gym. He was hospitalized for more than a week, then had major heart surgery performed on September 5. A rumor circulated throughout horror film fandom that Naschy had died, since he disappeared from the film scene for a while after his operation. He had to later contact a number of fanzine publishers in various countries to inform them that he was still alive. In 1996, Naschy wrote and starred in his 11th werewolf film Licántropo, which he thought would be a big comeback film for him, but the movie did not do well at all, critically or financially. He continued to appear in a number of low budget horror films and crime dramas, however, during the following decade, during which time he won a number of prestigious fan awards and appeared as a celebrated guest at many horror film conventions during the 1990s and the 2000s (both in the United States and in Europe). But he was still doing poorly financially, and complained bitterly in interviews about the state of the corrupt Spanish film industry which he said practiced favoritism and cronyism. In 1997, Naschy wrote a detailed autobiography entitled Paul Naschy: Memoirs of a Wolf Man (which included his filmography as well). Naschy traveled to Hollywood briefly in 2003 to appear in two shot-on-video (adult content) horror films directed by Donald F. Glut and Fred Olen Ray, two former horror fans-turned-directors who idolized him. Filming was complicated by a language barrier as Naschy had never learned to speak English. Also, Naschy had brought his wife and son Sergio along with him, and the day after they arrived, his wife was hospitalized with a stomach virus, so Naschy was a bit preoccupied during the shoot. During his sojourn in Hollywood, Naschy visited Universal Studios as well as the famed "Ackermansion" museum of Forrest J Ackerman, the editor of the legendary magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. Personal life On October 24, 1969, Naschy married Elvira Primavera, the daughter of an Italian diplomat living in Spain, and they remained happily married 40 years later at the time of his death. His wife was always very supportive of his filmmaking projects. He was survived by his widow Elvira and their two sons, Bruno and Sergio Molina. Naschy was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2008 and died on November 30, 2009, at a hospital in Madrid, Spain at the age of 75. Although his life ended in relatively poor financial straits, Naschy always received a tremendous outpouring of love from his many fans at the conventions he attended and continues to be regarded as a major horror film icon. was published in Germany after Naschy's death, collecting hundreds of rare photos, lobby cards, posters, etc. that had been used to promote Naschy's films over the decades in a number of different countries. A comprehensive film biography entitled Paul Naschy: The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry (a reference to Naschy's meeting Boris Karloff on the set of "I Spy" in 1966) has also been released on DVD. Most famous characters The werewolf Count Waldemar Daninsky (known in Spain as El Hombre Lobo) is Paul Naschy's most famous horror character, since he played Daninsky in 12 different films (13, if you count his cameo in El Aullido del Diablo). In fact, Naschy holds the record for the greatest number of roles as a werewolf, easily beating out Lon Chaney Jr., who played a werewolf only seven times during his career (even counting his House of Terror (1960 film) and his appearance on Route 66 (TV series).) Unlike the Chaney Universal films, however, which formed a somewhat chronological storyline from picture to picture, Naschy's Daninsky films were not connected to each other plotwise. Each film was more or less a free-standing story that was not meant to relate to the other films in the series in the way the old Universal films did. Daninsky's lycanthropy had a different origin in each film. This was probably for the best, however, since in the 1970s, European horror films were often theatrically distributed in the U.S. several years after they were completed, and they probably would have all been released out of order. Naschy's only other recurring character was the villainous medieval warlock Alaric de Marnac (who appeared in Naschy's Horror Rises from the Tomb (1972) and returned to life again in a sequel, Panic Beats (1983)). Naschy claims he based this character on a real-life medieval nobleman named Gilles de Rais, a serial killer on whose life story Naschy also based the lead character in his 1974 film El Mariscal del Infierno (''The Devil's Possessed'') ==The Hombre Lobo Series==