Remembering León Klimovsky

Born León Klimovsky Dulfano on October 16, 1906 in Buenos Aires, Argentina he studied and trained to be a dentist. His real love was films and was a pioneer in Argentinian film starting a film club in 1929 and helping finance the first movie theater to show art films. He became a screenwriter and an assistant director on 1944's "Se abre el abismo" and filmed his first movie, an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s "The Player" (1947). Klimovsky then moved and settled in Spain in the early 1950s where he became a producer, production manager, assistant director, and actor as well as director and screenwriter. In the 1950s-1970s he became involved in making Spaghetti westerns and exploitation and horror films. Starting with "Torrejón City" in 1952 Klimovsky is credited with twelve Euro-westerns but many of his credits were strictly for tax credits using his name as director while someone else either directed the film or a great portion of them without receiving co-director credit. His last credited Euro-western was 1971's "Reverend Colt". Klimovsky sometimes used the pseudonym Henry Mankiewicz. León died in Madrid as a result of heart failure on April 8, 1996. Today we remember León Klimovsky on what would have been his 105^th birthday.