[2] Born in Madrid of working-class parents, López Vázquez began his career on theatre in 1939 as a costume designer and set decorator before making his breakthrough as an actor.

Throughout the 1950s he mostly played bit parts in the Spanish film industry, however, his comedic talent soon allowed him to get bigger roles, cultivating an image as Spain's on-screen everyman in numerous comedies during the Franco era and beyond.

At one point in his career he became part of a distinctive Spanish art cinema led primarily by directors Luis García Berlanga, Juan Antonio Bardem, Carlos Saura and screenwriter Rafael Azcona.

He originally worked as a scenic designer for the sets of the Theatre of María Guerrero in times of Luis Escobar Kirkpatrick, as well as an assistant director to Pío Ballesteros and Enrique Herreros.

[9] The playwright and filmmaker José López Rubio had a decisive influence on his artistic side when he hired him as a costume designer for three films: It Happened in Damascus (1943), Eugenia de Montijo (1944) and Alhucemas (1948).

[12] A few years later he began a long-time collaboration with director Luis García Berlanga, giving him a small role in the 1951 comedy That Happy Couple, co-directed by Juan Antonio Bardem.

Shortly after, he made a part in Bardem's Felices Pascuas [es] (1954),[13] and Berlanga counted on him for two supporting roles in Boyfriend in Sight (1954), playing a nineteenth-century beach flirt, and Miracles of Thursday (1957), as a skeptical priest.

[15][16] López Vázquez was given the chance to be appreciated abroad for the first time by the Italian director Marco Ferreri, with whom he shot his first starring role in El Pisito (1959), an anti-bourgeois black comedy based on a 1957 novel by screenwriter Rafael Azcona, which is centred on Rodolfo (López Vázquez), a timid, middle-class man who marries a crotchety, dying octogenarian to inherit her apartment and eventually marry his fiancee Petrita (Mary Carrillo).

[21] In the early 1960s he worked on two Berlanga's savage satires: Plácido (1961), nominated to the Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film in 1962,[22] where López Vázquez shined In the role as Gabino Quintanilla, an event organizer without moral principles.

[27] The movie co-starred the Spanish actress Gracita Morales, which he formed a popular partnership in such comedies as Pedro Lazaga's Sor Citroën (1967), and Mariano Ozores' Operation Mata Hari (1968).

[33] Then he chained a series of major projects, starting when director Pedro Olea chose him for the lead role in the 1970 horror film El Bosque del Lobo (The Ancines Woods),[34] in which he was the epilectic peddler Benito Freire (based on Spanish serial killer Manuel Blanco Romasanta), who, due a childhood trauma, periodically suffered from an irresistible urge to strangle women.

[36] This was followed by Berlanga's 1970 black comedy Long Live the Bride and Groom, as a man about to get married when his mother appear dead in the pool shortly before the ceremony,[37] and his second collaboration with Saura in The Garden of Delights (1970), as a ruthless tycoon, catatonic and paralysed in a wheelchair after a car accident, who holds the key to his family's fortune.

[46] He collaborated again with Olea in the 1973 thriller No es bueno que el hombre esté solo, as a widowed man living with a life-size doll whose secret is discovered by a new neighbour (Carmen Sevilla).

[51][52] In the next years he continued working with regularity in films and television, notably in Mercero's television series Este señor de negro [es] (1975–1976), as Sixto Zabaleta, a bench jeweler who represents the most archaic and outdated values of the Spanish society,[53] Pedro Masó's comedy drama La miel [es] (1979), which he starred alongside Jane Birkin as a schoolteacher who is attracted to the young mother of a student (Jorge Sanz),[54] the film based on Eduardo Mendoza Garriga's 1975 novel The Truth on the Savolta Affair [fr] (1980), as Domingo 'Pajarito' de Soto, a journalist who investigates the violent death of a worker at the Savolta weapons factory,[55] and Berlanga's trilogy La escopeta nacional (1978), Patrimonio nacional (1981) and Nacional III (1982), performing a marquis of the aristocratic Leguineche family in a satire on the powers of Franco's regime.

[56] Other film appearances in the 1980s include Mario Camus' Golden Bear-winning film The Beehive (1982),[57] based on the 1950 novel by Camilo José Cela in which he plays an ex-Communist scratching out an existence in Francoist Spain,[58] Olea's period drama Akelarre (1984), portraying an inquisitor,[59] The Court of the Pharaoh (José Luis García Sánchez, 1985), as a bumbling police inspector,[58] Mi general [es] (de Armiñán, 1987), for which he won a second Latin ACE Award in 1989,[60] the comedy Moors and Christians (Berlanga, 1987), as a shameless man who drags an entire family into a delirious odyssey in which they come across grotesque characters,[61] the antimilitarist tragicomedy The Little Spanish Soldier (Antonio Giménez-Rico, 1988),[62] and the historical film Esquilache (Josefina Molina, 1989), as Antonio Campos, the secretary of Leopoldo de Gregorio, 1st Marquess of Esquilache (Fernando Fernán Gómez).

[64] From the 1990s, López Vázquez slowed down and did mostly supporting work in The Long Winter (Jaime Camino, 1992),[65] The Fencing Master (Olea, 1992), as the inspector Jenaro Campillo in a film based on the 1988 novel of the same name by Arturo Pérez-Reverte,[66] the comedy Everyone Off to Jail (Berlanga, 1993), as a priest who pretends to be a socialist,[67] the fantasy thriller Memorias del ángel caído (David Alonso, Fernando Cámara, 1997),[68] the action comedy Torrente 2: Mission in Marbella (Santiago Segura, 2001), in a cameo appearance as a client of José Luis Torrente,[69] Moscow Gold (Jesús Bonilla, 2003),[70] the Argentine comedy-drama Moon of Avellaneda (Juan José Campanella, 2004), as the elderly Don Aquiles,[71] and And Who Are You?

[79] Among the stage productions in which he starred: Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop, 1947; Lope de Vega's La dama boba, 1951; André Roussin's Bobosse, 1953; Pietro Garinei's Buonanotte Bettina, 1958; Alexandre Dumas' Kean, 1958; Cartas credenciales, 1960; Alfonso Paso's Los Palomos, 1964; Murray Schisgal's Luv, 1967; Peter Shaffer's Equus, 1976; in the lead role as the psychiatrist Martin Dysart,[80] Fermín Cabal's Vade Retro!, 1982; Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, 1985; which won critical praise for his performance as Willy Loman,[81] Santiago Moncada's Cena para dos, 1991, and Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys, 1997.

[83] In 2002, the Spanish Ministry of Culture awarded him the National Theatre Prize "for his extraordinary quality as a tragicomic actor throughout a long artistic career, which is still present today on our stages".

[97] In 2024, the Cultural Space Serrería Belga (Medialab Matadero) is presenting the exhibition José Luis before López Vázquez, showing the lesser-known facets of the actor.