Fernando Fernán Gómez

Fernando Fernán Gómez: Four Careers, One Irascible Man

Asked to name the single artist who embodies the whole of Spanish cinema, Pedro Almodóvar did not hedge: "If there's one artist who represents the history of Spanish cinema from its origins down to today, it's Fernando Fernán-Gómez." The man in question had by then appeared in roughly two hundred films, directed several of the best his country produced, written the play about the Civil War that Spain still stages, and been elected to the Royal Spanish Academy. Outside Spain, almost nobody knew his name.

Born on Tour

He was born in Lima in 1921, while his mother, the actress Carola Fernán-Gómez, was working her way through a South American theatrical tour. The family returned to Spain in 1924. He therefore began life as the child of a touring company — an origin that would reappear, transfigured, in the best work he ever did as a director.

The Franco Years, From the Inside

His screen career began in 1943 and did not stop until 2006: some two hundred films across sixty-three years. Variety's obituary put the case bluntly — from his debut through the mid-1960s he shaped most of the artistically significant Spanish films of the period, and remained largely unknown abroad because Franco's dictatorship had little interest in promoting Spanish cinema to the world. Red-haired and gravel-voiced, he was for decades simply the face and sound of the national industry, working through censorship rather than around it, and finding in a repressive commercial cinema the room to be sardonic.

The Director Nobody Outside Spain Was Watching

The directing is the part that deserves rediscovery. Four films — *La vida por delante* (1958), *La vida alrededor* (1959), *El extraño viaje* (1964) and *El mundo sigue* (1964) — are regarded as comic masterpieces and as the foundation of Spain's tradition of acerbic social comedy, a hybrid of Italian neo-realism and pure satire. They also anticipated devices, jump-cuts among them, that the world would shortly credit to the French New Wave. *El extraño viaje*, a bleak and very funny study of provincial Spanish repression, was later named by Almodóvar among the thirteen most influential Spanish films ever made. None of this reached an international audience at the time. Fernán Gómez was inventing a national cinema inside a country the rest of Europe had stopped looking at.

The Voyage to Nowhere

In 1986 he directed *El viaje a ninguna parte*, adapted from his own novel: the story of an itinerant theatre troupe collapsing as cinema arrives to destroy its livelihood. It was the material of his childhood, told from inside. At the first Goya Awards ceremony, the newly founded Spanish equivalent of the Oscars, the film swept the field. He would collect six Goyas over his career.

As an actor he had by then become the indispensable elder of Spanish film, working for Víctor Erice in *El espíritu de la colmena*, for Carlos Saura, for Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, for Fernando Trueba in the Oscar-winning *Belle Epoque* (1994) and for Almodóvar in *All About My Mother* (1999). Twice the Berlin Film Festival gave him its Silver Bear for acting — for *El anacoreta* in 1977 and *Stico* in 1985 — and in 2005 the fifty-fifth Berlinale handed him an Honorary Golden Bear for his life's work.

Man of Letters

The fourth career was writing, and he did not treat it as a sideline. His 1977 play *Las bicicletas son para el verano*, which looks at the Civil War through the daily life of a Madrid family, won the Lope de Vega Prize and entered the permanent Spanish repertoire. He wrote novels, including the one that became *El viaje a ninguna parte*. In 1990 he published *El tiempo amarillo*, a memoir running to some seven hundred pages. In 2000 the Real Academia Española — the body that governs the Spanish language — elected him to a seat, an honour that goes to writers, not to actors who write.

Why Fernando Is Called a Genius

The case here is unusually concrete, and it is about range rather than depth in any single field. Most people who claim four disciplines are competent in one and passable in the rest. Fernán Gómez reached the top of four: he was among the finest screen actors his country produced, directed films now taught as national landmarks, wrote a play that outlived its politics, and was admitted to the Royal Spanish Academy on the strength of his prose. The cognitive quality underneath all of it is a single, consistent sensibility — a comic pessimism about Spanish life, delivered without cruelty — that survives translation between forms. The satire of *El extraño viaje*, the elegy of *El viaje a ninguna parte* and the domestic clarity of *Las bicicletas* are recognisably the work of one mind using whichever tool the material required. Almodóvar called it "limitless versatility," and used him as the measure of the entire national cinema.

The honest counter-case is substantial. Two hundred films across six decades cannot all be good, and many were journeyman work taken for a fee under a dictatorship that rewarded blandness; the directing career is uneven and several of its entries are forgotten for cause. He was famously difficult, and his reputation was for a long time as much about temperament as achievement. Crucially, the loudest claim for his greatness comes from a friendly successor rather than from a settled international critical consensus — outside Spain he remains a footnote, which is a fact about distribution but also a limit on the claim. What survives scrutiny is not "genius" as sudden invention but something rarer in practice: sustained first-rank work in four separate crafts, over sixty-three years, by one person.

Legacy

He died in Madrid on 21 November 2007, aged eighty-six, of heart complications. Spain had already given him nearly everything it had: the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 1995, the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts, six Goyas, a seat among the immortals of its language. A Madrid theatre now carries his name. The rest of the world is still catching up to a body of work that Franco's Spain kept, largely by accident, to itself.

Achievements

• Silver Bear
• Notable work: El ascensor de los borrachos
• Notable work: Mi hija Hildegart
• Worked as film director, actor and screenwriter