Bigas Luna - Telegraph "The first thing he asked me was my age," she recalled. "I said I was 17 and he, always very gently and without making me feel too bad, laughed in my face and said: 'Well, you won't make this movie, but I'll call for another when you're older."" Luna was as good as his word, casting her when she really was 17. A tangled small town tale of intergenerational sex, Jamón, Jamón and its nude bullfighting scenes proved a popular and critical success. Roger Ebert in The Chicago Sun-Times, called it "a throwback to the days when directors took crazy chances, counting on their audience to keep up with them." Billed as a film where "women eat men and men eat ham" a tousled Penélope Cruz spends much of the film minus crucial items of clothing. After making the picture the actress suffered a nervous breakdown, and while Luna called it "a portrait of everything I like, love and hate about Spain," Penélope Cruz's uncle complained that it had made her feel "like a piece of meat, just a product." Penélope Cruz recovered, however, to become a Hollywood star. She had a relationship with the actor Tom Cruise, and in 2010 married her Jamón, Jamón co-star Javier Bardem at a ceremony in the Bahamas. Luna's work travelled well: Jamón, Jamón earned him the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival as well as the Jury Award at the festival in the Basque city of San Sebastián. More recently he met with further success beyond his native Spain with My Name Is Juani (2006), in which a young woman ditches her small town for Madrid. Juan José (his Catalan names were Josep Juan, and he preferred to be known by his two last names only) Bigas Luna was born on March 19 1946 in Barcelona. As an industrial graphic designer in the 1960s he became interested in conceptual art and the emerging visual technologies, and worked for several years as an artist, selling a painting from his first exhibition to Dalí, who became a friend. After a spell in advertising, he moved into films, directing a number of experimental low-budget pornographic movies that attracted attention for their outlandishly inventive treatment of sex in liberated post-Franco Spain. In 1976 his first mainstream feature, Tatuaje (Tattoo), a detective thriller, was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Having retired to Tarragona in 1986 to paint, in 1990 he was persuaded by the producer Andrés Vicente Gómez to return to filmmaking with The Ages of Lulu, with its scenes of what Luna described as "my thing: transvestites and sadism," and in which he gave the future Oscar-winning actor Javier Bardem his first starring screen role. He then embarked on his erotic Trilogía Ibérica, starting with Jamón, Jamón in 1992, followed by Huevos de Oro (Golden Balls) in 1993 and La teta y la luna (The Tit and the Moon) a year later. Reflecting his earlier life as an artist, Luna's films often include scenes from celebrated paintings, such as a work by Goya which is recreated for a fight scene in Jamón, Jamón. And two more canvases by the same artist depicting the same woman - one naked, one clothed - are referenced in Volavérunt. Latterly Luna revived his interest in avant-garde experimentation and audiovisual formats, and he directed and produced a large-scale multimedia installation for the Spain Pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010, fusing live flamenco dance with sculpture and videos on more than 20 projectors. Luna celebrated the synergy between food and sex, and between 2008 and 2012 he was the art director at the oldest musical café in Europe, El Plata, in Zaragoza, where he devised a striptease cabaret show during which clients could dine on typical Spanish dishes such as paella and ham and Spanish omelette. In recent years Luna had increasingly dedicated himself to his farmhouse garden, growing tomatoes, baking bread, looking after his cockerel, Obama, and producing modest quantities of wine. Bigas Luna is survived by his wife, Celia, and three daughters. Bigas Luna, born March 19 1946, died April 5 2013