Labyrinth of Passion (1982)

A young stage performer from Málaga who initially dreamed of playing soccer, Banderas was plucked from Spain’s National Theatre in the early ’80s by Almodóvar. A master of satire and melodrama, Almodóvar was in the vanguard of Spain’s “Movida Madrileña,” a countercultural reaction to the death of the dictator Francisco Franco. Labyrinth of Passion was Almodóvar’s second movie, an anarchic soap opera about the gay romance between a pop star and a prince. Banderas, who was 19 years old when the film was shot, smolders in the supporting role of a terrorist revolutionary looking to thwart the main pairing.“We presented a tribe that was way more sweet, more colorful than what the regime permitted,” Banderas recalled of the film’s ensemble in a recent interview with Vulture. “That went to the mind of young people who wanted to break with the past and propose something new and fresh for the future.”

Law of Desire (1987)

Banderas frequently collaborated with Almodóvar in the ’80s, giving terrific supporting turns in films such as Matador and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. One of his most impressive leading roles was in Law of Desire, in which he plays Antonio, a repressed and closeted man who grows romantically obsessed with a film director. Banderas’s work with Almodóvar often used his looks to disguise the characters’ potential for dark villainy, and Law of Desire works because of its compassion for Antonio even as he starts to spiral. Much like Labyrinth of Passion, the film was greeted with scandal upon release because of its sexual frankness.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989)

The last film Banderas made with Almodóvar for more than 20 years, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! grabbed Hollywood’s attention, which is strange to consider, given the movie’s shocking content. Once again, Banderas plays a handsome but twisted creature, a psychiatric patient named Ricky who kidnaps and imprisons an actress (Victoria Abril) he’s in love with. It’s one of Almodóvar’s masterpieces, a satire of classic love stories told through the warped perspective of someone who can’t distinguish between reality and fiction. Banderas’s performance, which balances charm and menace, sums up what makes him so hypnotic to watch.

Philadelphia (1993)

Banderas’s first English-language film was 1992’s The Mambo Kings, for which he learned and performed his lines phonetically. He was then slotted into several secondary roles that traded on his European mystique, before appearing in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia. Here, Banderas is the supportive boyfriend of Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks), an attorney suing his employer for homophobic discrimination. Compared with the actor’s work with Almodóvar, Philadelphia is a rather delicate and tame effort, featuring only one chaste kiss between Hanks and Banderas, but it was nonetheless a groundbreaking story for mainstream Hollywood.