Luis Buñuel Portolés, was born on February 22, 1900 in Calanda (Teruel, Aragon, Spain) and died on July 29, 1983 in Mexico City.
His father, Leonardo Buñuel González, originally from Calanda, where he had a hardware store business, made a great fortune in Cuba. After Cuban independence, he liquidated his businesses and returned to his hometown where he married María Portolés Cerezuela, much younger than him, with whom he had seven children.
Luis Buñuel spent all his childhood and primary and secondary education in Zaragoza, mainly in the Jesuits, until he finished high school at the age of 17, when he left for university studies in Madrid.
To do this, he would stay at the Student Residence, founded by the Free Institution of Education, where he stayed for seven years. There Buñuel befriended Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, Pepín Bello, Juan Ramón Jiménez, among others.
At this time he published stories and poems in avant-garde magazines, and he even had a book compiling them with the title of An Andalusian Dog. Many of the images of his writings from these years, prior to French surrealism, would go to his cinema. During these years, he also had knowledge of the most important international trends in thought and art, and showed his interest in the Dadá Gallery, and the work of Louis Aragon and André Bretón.
In 1928 he prepared a film script about Francisco de Goya on the occasion of the centenary that a Zaragoza commission sponsored. It did not come to fruition, and neither did a project based on a script by Ramón Gómez de la Serna that was to be titled El mundo por ten cents, in which the common thread was going to be such a coin and how it changes ownership.
In January 1929, Buñuel and Dalí, in close collaboration, finalized the script for a film that would successively be titled The Marist in the Crossbow, It is Dangerous to Look Inside, and, finally, An Andalusian Dog. It was finally shot in April of the same year with a budget of 25,000 pesetas that his mother contributed and it premiered in June at the Studio des Ursulines, a Parisian cinema-club, in which it achieved a resounding success among the French intelligentsia, as it remained on display for nine consecutive months at Studio 28.
from exile he commissioned him to supervise (as technical and historical advisor) two films about the Spanish Civil War. His friends Charles Noailles and Rafael Sánchez Ventura helped him with travel expenses.
In 1941, when Cargo of Innocents began, the general association of American producers banned all films against Franco, which meant the end of the project in which Buñuel was involved. Without work and with little money, he accepted the commission to direct the selection of anti-Nazi films offered by the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York.
He returned to Hollywood and went to work for Warner Brothers as head of dubbing for Spanish versions for Latin America. After the collaboration with Warner ended in 1946, he stayed in Los Angeles in search of a job related to the cinema and to be granted the American nationality, which he had applied for.
When Luis Buñuel was still living off the money he had saved the previous year, by chance he met Denise Tual, the widow of Russian actor Pierre Batcheff, at a dinner at the home of French filmmaker René Clair, the widow of Russian actor Pierre Batcheff, the protagonist of An Andalusian Dog ( whose real name was Pyotr Bachev and who had committed suicide in 1932).
In 1970, he shot again in Spain: Tristana, this time in co-production and starring Catherine Deneuve, who had already starred in Belle de jour.
In 1972 he received the Oscar for best foreign film for The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie), making him the first Spanish director to do so. This film, together with the one shot in 1968, La Voie Lactée (The Milky Way) and The Phantom of Liberty (1974) (Le Fantôme de la Liberté) make up a kind of Viridianatrilogy that attacks the foundations of conventional narrative cinema and attacked the cause-consequence concept advocating the exposure of chance as the engine of behavior and the world.
In 1977 he culminated his work with That Dark Object of Desire (Cet Obscur Objet du Désir), which received the special award at the San Sebastián Film Festival, and reviews topics previously dealt with in Viridana or Tristana.
If he had always been obsessed with death, in the last five years of his life, deaf, with little sight, with some surgery or another, he stopped watching movies, television and barely picked up a book, except for The Old Age of Simone de Beauvoir , which I read and reread. He thought about his death and the end of the world, joking with others about his old age. With the help of his friend Jean-Claude Carrière, who for more than 18 years collected material from interviews and conversations during breaks from filming, he wrote Mon dernier soupir (‘My last breath’). The title already reflects the obsession he had in the last moments of his life; He didn’t want to give them importance, but he was thinking about them. Since he was an atheist, on the day of his death he planned to gather all his atheist friends and confess. For him, being a joker was a way of showing that he was against order.
Luis Buñuel died on July 29, 1983 at dawn, due to heart, liver and kidney failure. His last words were to his wife Jeanne: “Now I am dying.” He remained true to his ideology until the end, there was no ceremony and it is currently unknown where his ashes are found.