The man in the red Mercedes on the coast who first brought Hollywood to Spain

It's the 1970s. A sumptuous burgundy-red Mercedes Benz 250 CE drives up the road connecting Arroyo de la Miel with the village of Benalmádena. In the passenger seat is Gwynne Pickford, niece of silent film star Mary Pickford and daughter of Lottie Pickford, also an actress until her early death from alcoholism in 1939 at the age of 43. Long before that, young Gwynne was adopted first by her grandmother Charlotte and then by her famous aunt. Around the same time, in 1919, Mary Pickford founded, together with Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and director D.W. Griffith, the film production company United Artists (UA).

Mary Pickford retired from film in 1933 after one Oscar and more than 200 films. She was still a great female public figure, but the films had become too small for her. She devoted her time to the UA business until 1965 when she retired to her mansion, which she rarely left until her death. One of her last trips, in 1964, was to the Costa del Sol with her third husband Charles 'Bud' Rogers.

Fast-forward to that same Costa del Sol where that red Mercedes engine is roaring in the 1970s. To any local resident the scene might remind them of a 007 film. At the wheel, George Herbert Ornstein, better known as Bud or Buddy. Like his wife Gwynne, his life is only understood through the silver screen. In 1961, as head of UA in Europe, he was in London with producers Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman looking for the lead in a new spy movie. "As they watched from the first-floor window as Sean Connery arrogantly crossed the street, the producers and Ornstein were convinced they had found their James Bond," says Connery biographer André Yule. James Bond pitching against Dr No was an unexpected blockbuster and the start of the indefatigable 007 franchise.

The Mercedes arrives at the bridge at Arroyo Hondo and drives into a hidden, luxury residential estate called Rancho Domingo. "Before, on the door, were the names of all the residents, in tile," says Jesús Peinado. He and his nine siblings lived with their parents in Viñas Viejas, a farmhouse that adjoined this estate built by Simon and Maurice Beriro (also responsible for the Tropicana Hotel in Torremolinos). The year was 1959.

"It was called Rancho Domingo because Simon turned up one Sunday afternoon on a sightseeing tour with his wife. I was 10 or 11 years old, I happened to be looking after animals. He spoke to me, I introduced him to my father and he took him to the owners. He bought the land for five million pesetas." What was once a field became a 22-hectare luxury residential complex with 27 detached family homes designed by the architect Robert Mosher, a disciple of Frank L. Wright. "Simon helped us, he put electricity in the farmhouse, water, telephone... they were a godsend," says Peinado.

It has not been easy to speak to anyone in the Ornstein-Pickford family to confirm how they ended up in Rancho Domingo. The youngest, Mary and John, aged 78 and 76 respectively, live in the United States. "My father's favourite song was 'Viva España'," says the eldest, Suzy Ornstein, in her 80s, in a telephone conversation. She confirms her parents' friendship with the Beriro family. Yet the relationship with Spain began in 1953 when Bud, until then stationed in Italy, was appointed to head up United Artists in Spain and the family moved to Barcelona, where they settled in a luxurious apartment on the Diagonal. "I remember there were always movie scripts on the floor," says Suzy. "My mother was the sweetest woman in the world and the most beautiful. My father was very correct and very strict."

At the beginning of the 1950s the Franco regime in Spain blocked the profits of the major Hollywood studios from leaving Spain when they were filmed in the country as well as those of other American companies. Why? "Spain lacked dollars," explains CSIC (Spain's national scientific research council) researcher Pablo León Aguinaga, a reality "very similar to that of much of Western Europe after the Second World War."

Despite several approaches from the Spanish government of the time, the major studios, which had grouped together under the Motion Picture Export Association of America Inc (MPEA, today known as MPA), decided to apply the blockade in 1955.

"For two and a half years, not a single film was exported to Spain," says Aguinaga. It was in this context that Ornstein seized the opportunity. "United Artists began to produce films in Spain despite the boycott," Aguinaga explains, using "those blocked funds" in a similar way to what was being done in countries such as the United Kingdom and Italy. "Basically what they are doing is using the profits in pesetas to produce here," something that, according to Aguinaga, not only helped to "make much cheaper films with high quality professionals and with different storylines," but also to bring a large number of Hollywood stars to Spain in the 1950s.

Nevertheless, it was Ornstein who was the first to make a major Hollywood film production on Spanish soil. The film was Alexander the Great, directed by Robert Rossen and with Richard Burton in the lead role. The film was shot in 1955 in the Madrid towns of El Vellón, El Molar, Rascafría and Manzanares el Real, but also in the province of Malaga. The Spanish government, aware that it was "exploiting an internal division within Hollywood," in Aguinaga's words, allowed units of the National Police and the Army to participate as extras in the most epic scenes. It was a wholehearted collaboration, as shown in a photo by EFE taken on 19 February 1955 at the Sevilla Film Studios in Madrid: next to Ornstein is the dictator's daughter, Carmen Franco, enjoying a cocktail in the middle of filming.

In that little paradise called Rancho Domingo the Mercedes comes to a stop just outside the entrance to a village that was, and still is, called San Ysidro, the same name of the natural gorge where the Pickfair mansion stood. The only remains of their past in a place where Gwynne and Bud had decided to retire in their early fifties away from all the glitz and glamour of the silver screen. "I was their electrician," says Peinado, who recalls that "they were very polite and good people. The woman would say, 'come, come', and she would give you a 500 peseta note. And she spoke perfect Spanish but he never spoke a single word."

When Jesús Peinado got married in the church of San José Obrero in the parish of Carranque, Malaga, the Ornstein-Pickfords did more than attend his wedding. "He lent me his Mercedes with his son as chauffeur," he says gratefully. Several years earlier, in February 1956, Bud had parked at Madrid's Barajas airport ready to pick up Sophia Loren, whom he brought over to film The Pride and the Passion by director Stanley Kramer with locations in Madrid, Galicia, Segovia and Ávila. This was another co-production between UA and Spain's CB Films with Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra also in the cast. Bud arranged a reception for the Italian actress at his Barcelona mansion. "She came to our apartment and was tired," Suzy recalls, "so my father said 'you can lie on my son Johnny's bed'. And Johnny came home from school, opened his bedroom door and found Sophia asleep."

Ornstein was also a great host to Kirk Douglas. In July 1958 he accompanied him to present The Vikings, a film again distributed by UA and in Spain by CB Films, at the San Sebastian Film Festival. That year, Bud would begin production on Spanish soil of Solomon and Sheba directed by King Vidor. During filming the lead actor, Tyrone Power, died from a heart attack. Yul Brynner took the role.

In 1960 Bud was promoted as head of all UA productions in England and in Europe. Before leaving Spain he was awarded the Order of Civil Merit by Franco. In England, while her father oversaw the production of the first two Beatles films, A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965) directed by Richard Lester, Suzy falls in love with Neil Aspinall, childhood friend of Paul McCartney and George Harrison and the band's road manager. They married in 1968. By then Ornstein had left United Artists to become vice-president of Paramount in charge of European production.

Bud would normally spend a few hours tending his garden with Román Peinado, Jesús' brother. "Román was like a brother to him, they were always together. He liked to have a conversation with my brother, just a little bit of Spanish." "My father was very involved in the garden," Suzy admits. Benalmádena in those days was nothing like it is today. "It was a 'really sweet' little village, with a church, a park and only one restaurant." Suzy explains, "I would arrive with my children and the first thing was to go to Fuengirola to do a bit of shopping. And I would cook for everyone."

In 1972 the Benalmádena Auteur Film Week (SICAB), led by Julio Diamante, paid tribute to Mary Pickford with the screening of seven of her films. Bud Ornstein's mediation was fundamental, if not essential to the success of that event. A memo dated 19 October of that year states that the film producer would be one of the actress's representatives at the tribute.

The Ornstein-Pickford link with this Costa del Sol location continues with Gwendy, daughter of John Ornstein and his Spanish wife, Maria Reyes Nieto. "We have a flat in Benalmádena, it's my favourite place in the world," she says. Her parents met during the filming of Villa Cabalga. "She was in the lead role, they were 16 or 17 years old, my father was with my grandfather."

Filmed between Colmenar Viejo (Madrid) and El Casar de Talamanca (Guadalajara) in 1967 and released a year later, it was a Paramount co-production directed by Buzz Kulik, with a script by Sam Peckinpah and a spectacular A-list cast: Robert Mitchum, Yul Brynner and Charles Bronson. Like everyone else in the family, Gwendy was always aware of the weight of the Pickford name. "I've held Mary Pickford's Oscar in my hand. When I was 17 they took me to the Pickfair mansion. It was quite a house, wasn't it? It even had a bomb-proof cellar and everything."

Suzy says that, despite his retirement, Bud was still itching to get back into the film world: "He used to go back to England to see if he could join EON Productions, to film again. But that didn't happen. In 1976 the Ornsteins decided to return to the United States. Although Bud liked life in Europe, says Suzy, "it was good for my mother to go back to Los Angeles where she had her friends, she had all her family there."

Shortly after returning to the States in 1978 'Bud' Ornstein died in Los Angeles at the age of 60 after complications from a relatively minor operation. A year later the family's matriarch, Mary Pickford, would pass away at the Pickfair home while her Gwynne would die in 1984 at the age of 68. With them a once-in-a-lifetime era of cinema and of the Costa del Sol came to an end. As Gloria Swanson's character, Norma Desmond, would say in Billy Wilder's classic Sunset Boulevard: "You see, this is my life. It always has been. There's nothing else. Just us, and the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark."