Bigas Luna: the Spanish director's best known films - in pictures

Spain's strict censorship laws were relaxed in 1977, shortly after General Franco's death. Luna quickly made Bilbao, a Warholesque slice of erotica about a man obsessed with a stripper - named, of course, after the eponymous city Photograph: British Film Institute

Luna went mainstream in 1990 with The Ages of Lulu - a highly charged erotic thriller that trod dangerously close to pornography. Francesca Neri plays the eponymous character on a trip through Madrid's sleazy underworld. Photograph: Alamy

The famous poster for Jamon Jamon, telling it like it is Photograph: BFI

The film that really put Luna on the map: Jamon Jamon, which became an international hit in 1992. Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem also got their first significant roles in an unsubtle satire on Spanish machismo. Photograph: Everett/Rex Features

Before David Beckham, Luna had the patent on Golden Balls – or Huevos de Oro, his Jamon Jamon follow-up. Here's Javier Bardem and Maria de Medeiros (shortly before her trip to the US for Pulp Fiction) – Bardem plays an architect with cojones aiming to build a giant, thrusting skyscraper Photograph: Alamy

Here's Luna at work, on the set of Bámbola, his 1996 film about a woman (Valeria Marini) who falls for a convict Photograph: Alamy

Arguably Luna's high point as an arthouse director, The Chambermaid on the Titanic had a classy international cast (Olivier Martinez, Romane Bohringer) and saw Luna on relatively restrained form. Martinez plays a foundry worker obsessed by a woman he meets only briefly, a chambermaid who appears to have gone down in the ocean liner disaster Photograph: Alamy

Luna reunited with Penélope Cruz in 1999 for Volavérunt, a study of the love life of painter Francisco Goya Photograph: Alamy