Spanish "Belle Epoque" scriptwriter Rafael Azcona dies aged 81
MADRID (AFP) — Spanish scriptwriter Rafael Azcona, who wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-winning film "Belle Epoque" starring Penelope Cruz, died Monday at the age of 81, Spanish media reported.
Azcona's wife Susi said he had been battling lung cancer for a long time, the web site of top-selling daily newspaper El Pais reported Tuesday.
Culture Minister Cesar Antonio Molina said Azcona's death "had left the world of film and literature without one of its great storytellers."
"He wrote with the same intelligence and dignity about comical situations anchored in reality, or of the tragedies of the human being," he said in a statement.
Born on October 24, 1926 in the northern city of Logrono, Azcona is credited with helping to revive cinema in Spain after the country's 1936-39 civil war.
He worked with most major Spanish filmmakers over the past five decades and wrote nearly 100 screenplays which were known for their social criticism and dark humour.
"Belle Epoque", about a pacifist army deserter in pre-Franco Spain who is welcomed into the home of a wealthy man, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1993 as well as nine Goya awards, the Spanish equivalent of the Academy Awards.
Among the other films he worked on was "Blood and Sand" (1989) starring Sharon Stone about a dirt-poor youth rising to fame and fortune in the bull ring and "Butterfly Tongues" (1999) about a sensitive young boy coming of age in the months before the outbreak of the Spanish civil war.
