They drew him into their fantastical worlds. He was fascinated by their allure, beauty and the power they exerted over men. He idolised Marlene Dietrich, Hedy Lamarr, Greta Garbo and flame-haired Rita Hayworth. These stories took Puig, a young gay man growing up in a repressive society, away from the reality of his situation and into a world of fantasy and imagination. Their only criterion was that the movies offered them a form of escapism. Their taste was broad and populist: B movies, zombie flicks, musicals and rom-coms were all part of the repertoire.

The Argentinian film industry didn't excite them in the way that Hollywood did. Even in adulthood, Puig would set his evenings aside for his mother whenever he was in Argentina, so that they could catch up on the latest films his friends would post to him. This passion for films was something she shared with her youngest son and it brought them very close. His father was a local businessman and his mother was a chemist and an avid movie-goer. Puig was born in General Villegas, in the pampas of Argentina, in 1932. The elusive Spider Woman of the title is in many ways the weaver of illusion - the writer himself. Finally, in 1993, Kiss of the Spider Woman hit Broadway as a Kander and Ebb (of Cabaret fame) musical with Chita Rivera in the title role. In the same year, Simon Callow and Mark Rylance appeared in an English translation of Puig's play at the Bush Theatre in London. In 1985 the film version, starring William Hurt and Raul Julia, earned Hurt an Oscar and brought the tale to a wider audience. The novel was published in Spain in 1974, having first been banned in the author's homeland. This story of the unlikely friendship between two cellmates - Valentin, a Marxist revolutionary, and Molina, a gay man who sees himself as a woman - has gone through several incarnations. The contradictions at the heart of the spider's symbolism fascinated the Argentinian writer Manuel Puig (1932-90), who placed it at the centre of his most famous work, Kiss of the Spider Woman. In India she is Maya, the eternal weaver of the web of illusion. The spider is seen as both passive, due to her connection with the moon, and aggressive as she sits and waits for her prey to fall into her trap. She is the cannibalising female who devours her partner after sex, the nurturing mother who feeds her young, the centre of the earth and, in male form, the superhero who saves New York from the Hobgoblin and Dr Octopus in Spiderman.

T he spider as a potent symbol has reappeared in popular mythology throughout the ages.

Kiss of a spider woman book