El Fary

José Luis Cantero Rada ("El Fary"), singer and actor: born Madrid 20 August 1937; married (three sons, one daughter); died Madrid 19 June 2007.

El Fary, as the Spanish singer José Luis Cantero was widely known, was a singer of "coplas", light, sentimental ballads that won him enormous popularity. But late in life he also gained fame as a television actor. He owed his nom de plume to his admiration for the coplista Rafael Farina, whose high-pitched wailing voice Cantero imitated to such effect that his friends started calling him El Farina, or El Fary.

The sixth son of a poor family in Madrid's Ventas neighbourhood, at 13 Cantero started working in a bar, then as a fruitseller's delivery boy and a gardener. He learned to read and write during his military service and when he was demobbed became a taxi driver, a profession he always recalled with pride. He confessed he once had the American screen goddess Ava Gardner, a frequent visitor to Madrid, in the back of his cab.

Then he tried running a bar-restaurant, but it failed. At each stage of his young life he spent the money he earned on recording and editing records of his songs, which he sold in the Rastro, the teeming Sunday flea market in Madrid.

Not until the 1970s did he become established in the music business when, paradoxically, "la copla" was at its least fashionable. He sharpened its traditional form, and fame (and fortune) followed in the mid-1980s with a string of hits, including his best known song, "El Toro Guapo" ("The handsome bull"): "Go little bull, oh, handsome little bull, who wears bootees so he doesn't go barefoot."

Success earned him the nickname "King of the Taxi-drivers", and he made regular guest appearances on television variety shows. Music buffs were dismissive of his quavering voice, but his light flamenco-style - or flamenquillo - records were bestsellers.

El Fary starred in the 1990s television drama series Menudo es mi padre ("Some father I have"), about an impecunious widowed taxi-driver bringing up several children. The role was tailor-made for him and the series ran for 60 episodes.

He found still wider fame with the release in 1998 of the film Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley (Torrente - the Dumb Arm of the Law) directed by the iconoclastic filmmaker Santiago Segura. The film (and its two sequels) star a corrupt policeman, played by Segura, who is a great fan of El Fary. The singer composed "Apatrullando la ciudad" ("Patrolling the city") as the signature tune for the series.

Elizabeth Nash

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