Sad news – Jose Martinez Martinez, aka Daniel Martin, died on September the 28th at his home, Las Truchas, a hotel in Nuévalos, at the age of 74, after a long-term illness.
Born in Cartagena, Murcia, on the 12th May 1935, MArtin trained in Barcelona before making his debut in Las hijas del Cid, an adventure film directed by Miguel Iglesias, and then made a big splash in Los tarantos, a Spanish classic which trasplanted the story of Romeo and Juliet to the Roma community of Barcelona, a kind of hispanic equivalent to West Side Story. His athletic, swarthy looks made him a natural for the Spaghetti Western genre, and he appeared in numerous genre films, from Richard Blasco’s 1963 film Gringo to The Return of Clint the Stranger in 1973, although probably his best known part was a the Mexican father in A Fistful of Dollars (64).
He also appeared in a number of other genre films, often in character parts, but opportunities declined with the lull in the Spanish film industry in the late 70s and 80s, and he spent most of the 90s working in television. By 2000, he appears to have retired.
