Fernando Fernández Gómez OAXS MMT (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. He received two Silver Bears for Best Actor at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, the National Theater Award, the Gold Medal of the Spanish Film Academy, and six Goya Awards, among other honours. He appeared in 200 films between 1943 and 2006,[1] which included The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Ana and the Wolves (1973), Mama Turns 100 (1979), Belle Époque (1992), The Grandfather (1998), Butterfly's Tongue (1999), and All About My Mother (1999). Throughout his career he worked with directors such as Carlos Saura, Víctor Erice, Pedro Almodóvar, Fernando Trueba, Luis García Berlanga, Juan Antonio Bardem, José Luis Garci, Jaime de Armiñán, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, Mario Camus, José Luis Cuerda, José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, José Antonio Nieves Conde, Rafael Gil, Edgar Neville, Antonio Pietrangeli, Luigi Comencini, and G. W. Pabst.
He directed over 25 films, including 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.[2][3] His film Voyage to Nowhere (1986) earned him critical acclaim, becoming the most awarded Spanish film at the 1st Goya Awards ceremony.[4]
According to his memoir,[5] 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.[6]
After some acting 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's company.[7] 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.[8]
In 1943, Fernán Gómez joined the film studio Cifesa and made his first movie appearance in Cristina Guzmán, directed by Gonzalo Delgrás.[9] Between the 1940s and 1960s, he established himself as a leading actor in the Spanish film industry, mostly in comic roles (Anchor Button, The Last Horse, I Want to Marry You, Captain Poison, The Pelegrín System, That Happy Couple, Airport, The Other Life of Captain Contreras, Faustina, La becerrada), but also in some more dramatic (El destino se disculpa, Carnival Sunday, Life in Shadows, Reckless, The Tenant, Rififi in the City).
He was very much in demand during the 1970s and 1980s, expanding his range as an actor in many films of the new Spanish cinema: starring alongside Geraldine Chaplin in Ana and the Wolves and its sequel Mama Turns 100, The Love of Captain Brando, Pim, pam, pum... ¡fuego!, The Remains from the Shipwreck, Maravillas, Feroz, The Court of the Pharaoh, Requiem for a Spanish Peasant, Half of Heaven, Moors and Christians, and in the role as Leopoldo de Gregorio, 1st Marquess of Esquilache in Esquilache. In 1973 he starred 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.[10][11] 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,[12] 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.[13] He also won the Pasinetti Prize for Best Actor for his role in Los zancos at the 1984 Venice Film Festival.[14] The 1990s was a less active period for him, but he enjoyed something of a revival, featuring in six major projects: The Dumbfounded King, the two winners of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film Belle Époque and All About My Mother,[15] The Grandfather, 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,[16][17] Plenilune, and the hit Butterfly's Tongue 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), awarded an Onda Award in 1993,[18] and later in the popular prime time television series Cuéntame cómo pasó (Remember When). In the 2000s he appeared in Visionaries, The Shanghai Spell, Tiovivo c. 1950, and Something to Remember Me By. One of his last great performances was in the film In the City Without Limits, again with Geraldine Chaplin, where he plays a dying man who suffered fearful delusions.[19]
During his acting career he would also play supporting roles in different foreign films such as Voice of Silence, The Bachelor, starring Alberto Sordi, The Pyjama Girl Case, with Ray Milland, and Marcellino pane e vino.
In the 1950s he began to direct movies, obtaining a nomination for Best Film at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival for his 1958 comedy La vida por delante,[20] which led to a sequel, La vida alrededor. His first films tended to be humorous satires (The Wicked Carabel, For Men Only, Don Mendo's Revenge). In 1964 he filmed El extraño viaje, a dark portrait of Spanish rural repression.[21] It was voted seventh best Spanish film by professionals and critics in 1996 Spanish cinema centenary,[22] 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.[23] The latter was followed by Life Goes On, one of the most terrifying and merciless moral portraits of Francoist Spain,[24][25] My Daughter Hildegart, Mambru Went to War, that gave him the first Goya Award for Best Actor,[26] Voyage to Nowhere, a film 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,[27][28] The Sea and Time, winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 1989 San Sebastián International Film Festival,[29] and Lázaro de Tormes, from which he received in 2001 his second Goya Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.[30]
On television, he directed and starred two notable productions: 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,[31] and the miniseries El pícaro, a historical comedy set in the 17th Century.
In addition to his extensive career in front and behind the screen, Fernán Gómez wrote several 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,[32] 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,[33] 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).[34]
He was runner up of the Premio Planeta de Novela for his 1987 historical novel El mal amor.[35] In 1993 he also obtained the Premio de Novela Espasa-Humor for his comedy novel El ascensor de los borrachos.[36]
In 1998 he published his memoirs titled El Tiempo Amarillo: Memorias (1921-1997). The work has 700 pages and was presented at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid.[37]
On October 27, 1995, he received the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts from the hands of Prince Felipe.[38] In 1999 the San Sebastián International Film Festival granted to him the Donostia Award.[39]
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".[40]
In 2001, he received the Gold Medal of Merit in Labour by the Spain's Council of Ministers for a lifetime of effort and work.[41]
He finally awarded the Honorary Golden Bear at the 55th Berlin International Film Festival for his lifetime achievemt in 2005.[42][43]
He married the Spanish 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.[44]
Fernando Fernán Gómez died in Madrid on 21 November 2007 from a heart failure aggravated by pneumonia and colon cancer.[45] 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".[46]
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".[47]
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.[48] 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.[49] 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.[50]
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