A good example of a personality held in (albeit tongue-in-cheek) high esteem by a broad cross-section of the Spanish populace (non-Spaniards might like to imagine a low-budget, midget version of Tom Jones, but without the powerful voice or personal trainer and dressed even more poorly than Tom at his seventies heights) , and, like Rocío Jurado before him, an oft mocked but equally loved symbol of Spain before it became another modern European economy.
A popular phrase here in Spain is that when a person is deemed to be ugly (very ugly), he would be considered "uglier than El Fary sucking a lemon". Not a nice thing really to be told that you are the very definition of ugliness (and more so if screwing your face up after sucking lemons), but when El Fary was asked on a couple of TV chat shows to actually suck a lemon, he duly obliged, even cracking "but where's the tequila?" when offered the citrus fruit by the host.
Yet although most people outside Spain had never heard of the man that his bank manager calls José Luis Cantero, his local fame was enough for various international newspapers to write his obituary.
Here, dear readers, are those international tributes in full:
Plus, in case you hadn't seen it, here's the man's Wikipedia entry.
