Cast
- Imanol Arias as Joan Marés/Juan Faneca
- Ornella Muti as Norma Valenti
- Loles León as Griselda
- Javier Bardem as Shoeshiner
- Joan Lluis Bozzo as Valls Verdú
- Blanca Apilánez as Carmen
Imanol Arias was launched to star status in Spain by his work with Vicente Aranda in El Lute, a film that was a critical and commercial success. Arias came to see his role in El Amante Bilingüe as a turning point in his career, a triumph after two years of relative inactivity. There are similarities between his own life and that of his character. He had a first failed marriage with a rich woman and came from modest background. The role in El Amante Bilingüe was an exciting challenge for him, having to play a character with dual personalities and different registers.
El Amante Bilingüe was co-produced with Italian investors and the role of Norma was given to Ornella Muti, an Italian actress famous for her beauty. Ornella Muti first gained attention in the English speaking world as the princess in Flash Gordon (1980). Here, she plays the suggestive role of a wealthy woman with unusual sexual fantasies. Vicente Aranda recalled “ I was very pleased with Ornella, she made as much as she could to adjust to the requirements of the film, but she is extremely beautiful and perhaps another actress, less attractive would have suited better the dark tone of the film”.
In supporting roles are: Javier Bardem, one of Spain’s best known actors, here in one of his first roles and Loles León, who plays a comic character. She has worked for Pedro Almodóvar in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and for Vicente Aranda in La Pasión Turca (1994) and Libertarias (1996).
Read more about this topic: The Bilingual Lover
Famous quotes containing the word cast:
“You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only it, but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“indolence read as abnegation,
slattern thought styled intuition,
every lapse forgiven, our crime
only to cast too bold a shadow
or smash the mold straight off.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)