Crikey
10 September 2006. Inspired by a local sleaze legend.
So the showman is no more. He made us smile, he made us laugh with his strange stunts on both big screen and small. But now he has died. Yes, Holly One, the 3'9" porn star and midget doorman of Barcelona's most notorious sex club Bagdad passed away on Friday, of a cardiac arrest brought on by a pulmonary infection. He was 41 years old.
Holly was born in Italy (although some reports have him down as being Swiss), and travelled to Ibiza in its glory days of the late 80s/early 90s, to become a gogo dancer in the now-legendary club Amnesia. He then travelled to Barcelona around the time of the Olympics, where he started his career as a porn actor. He starred in more than 100 films, adding, according to the obituary in today's El Mundo, "an eccentric air to the orgies". He claimed to have slept with more than 1000 women, and a couple of years ago, he won the Best Actor award at the Barcelona Erotic Film Festival for his starring role in Milk Bulls. He also appeared, albeit fleetingly, in Almodovar's All About My Mother.
He added a particularly freakish flavour to Barcelona's nightlife, standing as he often did outside Bagdad in his specially made, goldbraided doorman's uniform, his earrings glinting under his cap, beckoning people inside - and occasionally, it is said, appearing in the live sex shows himself. We even mentioned him in our guidebook.
Another local legend has gone. Maybe he'll be buried in his uniform.