José Antonio Mayáns Hervás (born 4 May 1939) is a Spanish actor, production manager and dubbing director. Beginning with supporting roles in large productions, he became a character actor in many Spanish genre films, and later found employment on television.
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Career
Mayans took his first steps in film through Spanish-based American producer Samuel Bronston. Having learned about the shooting of John Paul Jones (1959) in Dénia, he was hired as a stuntman thanks to his unusually good command of English for the time, and soon found himself serving as a translator between director John Farrow and the Spanish cast. He was brought back two years later for King of Kings (1961), where he made his speaking debut as a young John the Evangelist. Buoyed by this exposure, he decided to make acting his full-time career, honing his craft under the tutelage of American expatriate thespian and teacher William Layton. Mayans also played a priest in a short docudrama produced by Bronston about the Valley of the Fallen.
Mayans became a friend of Spanish-based Argentinian star Jorge Rigaud, with whom he shared the screen on a number of occasions. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was also a popular photonovel model, forming a regular couple with es:Maria José Cantudo. Amidst the moral liberalization that followed General Franco's death, he appeared in several S-rated movies, a new classification mostly used for sex films that bridged the previous era's strict censorship and the full-on pornography that would come about in the mid-1980s.
