Fernando Fernández Gómez (28 August 1921 – 21 November 2007), better known as Fernando Fernán Gómez, was a Spanish actor, screenwriter, film director, theater director, novelist, and playwright. Prolific and outstanding in all these fields, he was elected member of the Royal Spanish Academy in 1998. He was born in Lima, Peru while his mother, Spanish actress Carola Fernán-Gómez, was making a tour in Latin America. He would later use her surname for his stage name when he moved to Spain in 1924. Fernán Gómez was regarded as one of Spain's most beloved and respected entertainers, winning two Silver Bears for Best Actor at the Berlin International Film Festival for The Anchorite and Stico. He was also the recipient of the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, the National Theater Award, the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts, the Gold Medal of the Spanish Film Academy, and six Goya Awards. He starred in 200 films between 1943 and 2006, working with directors including Carlos Saura (Ana and the Wolves, Mama Turns 100), Víctor Erice (The Spirit of the Beehive), Fernando Trueba (Belle Époque), José Luis Garci (The Grandfather), José Luis Cuerda (Butterfly's Tongue) and Pedro Almodóvar (All About My Mother). He directed over 25 films, among them El extraño viaje (1964), and Life Goes On (1965), both great classics of the Spanish cinema that were very limited distribution due to Franco's censorship and made him a "cursed" filmmaker in his country. His film Voyage to Nowhere (1986) earned critical acclaim, becoming the most awarded Spanish film at the 1st Goya Awards ceremony.

Early life

According to his memoir, he was probably born in Lima on 28 August 1921, even though his birth certificate indicates that he was born in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires. His mother, the theater actress Carola Fernán Gómez, was touring South America when he was born in Lima, and his birth certificate was issued days later in Argentina, a country whose nationality he retained, in addition to Spanish nationality, which was granted to him in 1984. He was an extramarital son, his father was also the actor Luis Fernando Díaz de Mendoza y Guerrero, whose mother, the prominent theater actress María Guerrero, prevented the marriage between Fernando Fernán Gómez's parents.

Career

Acting and filmmaking

After some performing school works, he decided to study Philosophy and Letters in Madrid, which he subsequently abandoned when the Spanish Civil War began, but his true vocation led him to the theater. During the Civil War he received classes at the CNT School of Actors, making his professional debut in 1938 at the Laura Pinillos' company. There he was discovered by the Spanish playwright Enrique Jardiel Poncela, who offered him his first major opportunity in 1941, the role as "Redhead" in the play We Thieves Are Honourable. In 1943, Fernán Gómez joined the film studio Cifesa and made his first movie appearance in Cristina Guzmán, directed by Gonzalo Delgrás. Between the 1940s and 1960s, he established himself as a leading actor in the Spanish film industry, mostly in comic roles: El destino se disculpa (1945), Anchor Button (1948), The Last Horse (1950), I Want to Marry You (1951), Captain Poison (1951), The Pelegrín System (1952), That Happy Couple (1953), Airport (1953), The Other Life of Captain Contreras (1955), Faustina (1957), and La becerrada (1963). He also revealed his abiliy to play drama in Carnival Sunday (1945), Life in Shadows (1948), Reckless (1951), The Tenant (1957), and Rififi in the City (1964). During his career he occasionally play supporting roles in such foreign films as Voice of Silence (1953), The Bachelor (1955), starring Alberto Sordi, The Pyjama Girl Case (1977), with Ray Milland, and Marcellino pane e vino (1991). In the 1950s he began to direct movies, earning a nomination for Best Film at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival for his 1958 comedy La vida por delante, a story about the difficulties that a newly married couple has in moving forward with their housing, work and economic life. The film pioneered in Spain in breaking the fourth wall and telling the plot in the form of flashbacks and its success led him to made a sequel, La vida alrededor (1959). His first films tended to be humorous satires, including The Wicked Carabel (1956), For Men Only (1960), and Don Mendo's Revenge (1962). In 1964 he filmed El extraño viaje, a dark portrait of Spanish rural repression. It was voted seventh best Spanish film by professionals and critics in 1996 Spanish cinema centenary, and included in a British Film Institute list published in 2016 by film director Pedro Almodóvar among the 13 great Spanish films that inspired him. The latter was followed by Life Goes On (1965), one of the most terrifying and merciless moral portraits of Francoist Spain, He was very much in demand as an actor in the 1970s and 1980s, expanding his range in many films of the new Spanish cinema: starring alongside Geraldine Chaplin in Carlos Saura's Ana and the Wolves (1973) and its sequel Mama Turns 100 (1979), The Love of Captain Brando (1974), Pim, pam, pum... ¡fuego! (1975), The Remains from the Shipwreck (1978), Maravillas (1981), Feroz (1984), The Court of the Pharaoh (1985), Requiem for a Spanish Peasant (1985), Half of Heaven (1986), Moors and Christians (1987), and in the role as Leopoldo de Gregorio, 1st Marquess of Esquilache in Esquilache (1989). In 1973 he starred in Víctor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive, reaching an international audience for his role as a mournful intellectual father who has a small beehive inside his house. That same year he played Don Quixote in the Spanish-Mexican comedy Don Quijote cabalga de nuevo, co-starring Cantinflas as Sancho Panza. In 1977, he won the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the 27th Berlin International Film Festival for his role as a middle-aged man who decides one day to live in the bathroom and never leave it in The Anchorite, and again at the 35th Berlin International Film Festival in 1985 for his role as a broke Roman law professor who offers himself as a slave to an old student in exchange for house and food in Stico. He also won the Pasinetti Prize for Best Actor for his role in Carlos Saura's film Los zancos at the 1984 Venice Film Festival. He directed and starred in two notable productions for Televisión Española: the fantasy TV movie Juan soldado, which he won the Grand Prix for Best Director at the 9th International Television Festival Golden Prague in 1973, and the 1974 miniseries El pícaro, a historical comedy set in the 17th Century which was based on the picaresque novel. As a filmmaker he made, among others, My Daughter Hildegart (1977), a film inspired in the life of Spanish activist Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira, which turned out to be a box office hit in Spain, Mambru Went to War (1986), that gave him his first Goya Award for Best Actor, Voyage to Nowhere (1986), based on his own novel which describes a troupe of impoverished actors traipsing from village to village, achieving the Goya Awards for Best Film, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay in 1987, and The Sea and Time (1989), winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 1989 San Sebastián International Film Festival. The 1990s was a less active acting period for him, but he enjoyed something of a revival, featuring in five major projects: the historical co-production The Dumbfounded King (1991), the two winners of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film Belle Époque (1992) and All About My Mother (1999), The Grandfather (1998), which he won a second Goya Award for Best Actor in 1999 for his praised role as Don Rodrigo, Count of Albrit, an old Spanish aristocrat, and the hit Butterfly's Tongue (1999), playing Don Gregorio, a republican schoolteacher. In between, he was part of the cast of the comedy show Los ladrones van a la oficina (The thieves go to the office, 1993-1996), awarded an Onda Award in 1993. In 1999 the San Sebastián International Film Festival granted to him the Donostia Award, which made him the first Spanish movie-maker to receive this distinction. In the 2000s he appeared in Plenilune (2000), Visionaries (2001), the popular prime time television series Cuéntame cómo pasó (Remember When, 2001), The Shanghai Spell (2002), Tiovivo c. 1950 (2004), and Something to Remember Me By (2005). One of his last great performances was in the film In the City Without Limits (2002), again with Geraldine Chaplin, where he plays a dying man who suffered fearful delusions. The last film he directed was Lázaro de Tormes (2001), from which he received his second Goya Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. In 2005 he was awarded with the Honorary Golden Bear at the 55th Berlin International Film Festival for his lifetime achievement.

Stage and literary work

In addition to his extensive career in front and behind the screen, Fernán Gómez wrote numerous stage plays, novels, memoirs, articles, and poems. The most successful was the play Las bicicletas son para el verano (Bicycles Are for the Summer) in 1977, showing the sufferings of a family and their neighbours in besieged Madrid during the Civil War. He won the Lope de Vega Prize for that work in 1978, and it has been adapted into a popular film in 1984, directed by Jaime Chávarri. As theater director he staged plays such as Dear Liar (1962), by Bernard Shaw; The Kreutzer Sonata (1963), by Leo Tolstoy; Thought (1963), by Leonid Andreyev; and Juan José Alonso Millán's comedies Gravemente peligrosa (1962), Mayores con reparos (1965) and La vil seducción (1967). He was runner up of the Premio Planeta de Novela for his 1987 historical novel El mal amor. In 1993 he won the Premio de Novela Espasa-Humor for his comedy novel El ascensor de los borrachos. On October 27, 1995, he received the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts from the hands of Prince Felipe. In 1998 he published his memoir titled El Tiempo Amarillo: memorias ampliadas (1921-1997). The work has 700 pages and was presented at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. On January 30, 2000, he entered the Royal Spanish Academy for his artistic accomplishments, where he took possession of Seat B with the speech titled "Aventura de la palabra en el siglo xx".

Personal life, death and legacy

He married the Spanish, and singer María Dolores Pradera in 1945, with whom he had a daughter, the actress Helena Fernán Gómez, and a son, Fernando. They divorced in 1957. Later then, he had a long relationship with actress Emma Cohen, marrying in 2000. Fernando Fernán Gómez died in Madrid on 21 November 2007 from a heart failure aggravated by pneumonia and colon cancer. On 19 November 2007, he was admitted to the Oncology area of the Madrid University Hospital La Paz to be treated for pneumonia. Carmen Caffarel, head of the Instituto Cervantes, said "We've lost the great man of Spanish theater and film of the second half of the 20th century". Pedro Almodóvar highlighted him as "an artist who represents the history of Spanish cinema from its beginnings to the present day." The "excellence" in all his work, Almodóvar noted, was felt in his work as an actor: "He made the difficult as easy as possible, thanks to limitless versatility". That made him capable of "going from Don Mendo's Revenge on Bertolt Brecht". But he was also an "essential director in both film and theater", to the point of being "a complete and irreplaceable artist." "With delightful comedies such as La vida por delante and La vida alrededor, or the very scathing and masterpiece El extraño viaje". Concluding "I will always remember him, and I will continue watching his films". After the President of the Government José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero announced the death of the actor, the Government of Spain posthumously awarded Fernán Gómez the Grand Cross of the Civil Order of Alfonso X, the Wise on 23 November. The mayor of Madrid, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, also announced that the Cultural Center of the Villa de Madrid would be renamed the Fernán Gómez Theater. As he was a lifelong anarchist, his coffin was covered in a black and red anarchist flag and was later cremated in the Almudena Cemetery in Madrid. In 2017, in commemoration of the 10 years since his death, the exhibition Fernando Fernán Gómez “El Ilustrado” was inaugurated by the graphic artists of the Association of Cadiz Illustrators at the University of Cádiz. On 3 March 2022, the Instituto Cervantes received the “in memoriam” legacy of Fernán Gómez: his 1938 CNT card and the pen that was given to him when he entered the Royal Spanish Academy in 2000. The legacy was introduced into Box number 1003 of the Caja de las Letras by Fernán-Gómez's granddaughter, Helena de Llanos. In 2023, the Spanish Government acquired the archive of Fernando Fernán Gómez and his wife Emma Cohen, which is made up of 250 boxes and other objects that are already kept in the facilities of the Filmoteca Española, entity dependent on the Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts (ICAA).

Filmography

Film

Writer and Director

Acting roles

Television

Writer and Director

Acting roles

Theater

Playwright

Director

Actor

Novels

Historical novels

Memoirs

Articles and essays

Poetry

Children's Literature

Published plays

Published screenplyas

Collections

Interviews

Accolades

National Theater Award

National Cinematography Award

Goya Awards

Fotogramas de Plata

CEC Awards

Sant Jordi Awards

TP de Oro

New York Latin ACE Awards

Actors and Actresses Union Awards

Berlin International Film Festival

Venice Film Festival

San Sebastián International Film Festival

Mar del Plata International Film Festival

Gramado Film Festival

Biarritz International Festival of Audiovisual Programming

International Television Festival Golden Prague

Honours