Hollywood in La Rambla

I didn’t like being compared with refined Douglas Fairbanks

Errol Flynn

Barcelona has been the scenario of several film shootings. That’s why so many actors and actresses keep good memories of the city. La Rambla has its importance in many of them. For instance, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford visited Barcelona in 1924. Although they stayed at Hotel Ritz (current Palace Hotel), other actors did so in establishments of La Rambla.

As an example, among those celebrities that have stayed in Hotel Oriente (La Rambla) there is Errol Flynn (1909-1959). It was in 1937 and he was invited by Generalitat de Catalunya with the commission to write about the Spanish Civil War. He was given a box of cava bottles and so stunned he got than he needed help to get to his room in the middle of the night (or the morning). He explains this first contact with the city in his autobiography My Wicked, wicked ways (1959): "In Barcelona I was surprised to find two gentlemen waiting for us. They only spoke Spanish."

Among the actors who have shot scenes in La Rambla are Orson Welles, Peter Sellers and John Wayne (1907-1979). This last one did it in Gran Teatre del Liceu, whose stage was transformed into a track -with lions included- to film Circus World (1964). As a result of a small fire, the actor was about to suffer an accident. Hotel Oriente appears in one of the scenes of director Michelangelo Antonioni’s The passenger (1976). There they were Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider. More recently, Woody Allen incorporated this walk as a location for his film Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona (2008).