Fernando Fernán Gómez
gigatos | June 9, 2022
Summary
Fernando Fernández Gómez, known as Fernando Fernán Gómez or Fernando Fernán-Gómez (Lima, Peru, August 28, 1921-Madrid, Spain, November 21, 2007), was a Spanish novelist, playwright, actor, screenwriter and film, theater and television director. He was a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, where he took possession of chair B on January 30, 2000.
Most likely, as he wrote in his memoirs, he was born in Lima on August 28, 1921, although his birth certificate indicates that he was born in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires. The reason for this is that his mother, the theater actress Carola Fernán Gómez, was on tour in South America when he was born in Lima, so his birth certificate was issued days later in Argentina, a nationality he kept, in addition to the Spanish one, which was granted to him in 1984. Extramarital son, his father was the also actor Fernando Díaz de Mendoza y Guerrero, son of María Guerrero, who prevented the marriage between Fernando Fernán Gómez”s parents.
After some school work as an actor, he studied Philosophy and Letters in Madrid, studies that he abandoned at the beginning of the Civil War, but his true vocation led him to the theater. During the Civil War he took classes at the School of Actors of the CNT, debuting as a professional in 1938 in the company of Laura Pinillos; there he was discovered by Enrique Jardiel Poncela, who gave him his first opportunity by offering him, in 1940, a supporting role in his play Eloísa está debajo de un almendro, premiered in Madrid on May 24, 1940. Three years later he was hired by the film production company Cifesa and thus broke into the cinema with the film Cristina Guzmán, directed by Gonzalo Delgrás, and the following year he was offered his first leading role in Empezó en boda, by Raffaello Matarazzo. In fact, he worked as an actor until the early forties and then devoted himself to cinema, first as an actor (in hits such as Balarrasa or Botón de ancla) and later as a director, without neglecting his vocation as a playwright and stage director, and as a writer and regular scriptwriter at the Café Gijón. He led a nightlife in Madrid in the fifties, which he has recounted on more than one occasion. In the middle of this decade he began a popular professional partnership with the Argentine actress Analía Gadé, which started with Viaje de novios (1956), a film directed by León Klimovsky, and later with several more comedies, many directed by Pedro Lazaga, such as Muchachas de azul (1957), Ana dice sí (1958) or Luna de verano (1959). Fernán Gómez made his directorial debut with Manicomio (1954) and directed with Analía Gadé as the female lead in the films La vida por delante (1958) and La vida alrededor (1959).
He married and divorced singer María Dolores Pradera (1945-1957), with whom he had a daughter, actress Helena Fernán Gómez, and a son, Fernando, also related to culture. He then had a long relationship since the early seventies with actress Emma Cohen, after meeting her in an episode of the TVE series Tres eran tres (1973). Cohen and Fernán Gómez married in 2000, and the marriage lasted until his death in 2007.
From 1984 onwards he turned his increasingly intense literary vocation to writing very personal articles in Diario 16 and the Sunday supplement of El País, producing several volumes of essays and eleven novels, some of them strongly autobiographical and others historical: El vendedor de naranjas, El viaje a ninguna parte, El mal amor, El mar y el tiempo, El ascensor de los borrachos, La Puerta del Sol, La cruz y el lirio dorado, etcetera. His two-volume autobiography, El tiempo amarillo, of which there are two editions, the second one somewhat expanded, was a great success; but perhaps his most resounding success was obtained with a play, Las bicicletas son para el verano, about his memories of his adolescence during the Civil War, soon to be made into a film.
He was elected member of the Spanish Royal Academy in 1998 and took possession of chair B on January 30, 2000. He was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 1995.
Also read, history – Treaty of Amiens
Cinema
Multifaceted, loved and respected by industry professionals and by several generations of spectators, he found popularity as an actor almost at the beginning of his film career with the black comedy classic Domingo de carnaval (by the famous director Edgar Neville), which he starred in with Conchita Montes in 1945. Two years earlier he had appeared as a supporting actor in another notable Spanish film title of the forties as Cristina Guzmán. That same year he accompanied an already consecrated Imperio Argentina and the remembered leading man Alfredo Mayo in the exotic comedy Bambú, and also participated in a small classic of fantastic comedy as El destino se disculpa, by José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, following the style of the North American subgenre in vogue during those years (Norman Z. MacLeod”s La pareja invisible, René Clair”s Me casé con una bruja, Victor Fleming”s Dos en el cielo, etc.). From then on, he worked with Gonzalo Delgrás (Carlos Serrano de Osma) (Sáenz de Heredia) (José Antonio Nieves Conde) (Luis Marquina) (El capitán Veneno) (El capitán Veneno). At that time he also worked in Barcelona as a dubbing actor.
In the 1950s, he established himself as a leading actor in a series of comedies (El fenómeno), dramas (La gran mentira) and religious (Balarrasa) or folkloric (Morena Clara), propagandistic or directly escapist films (which in many ways is also considered as propaganda by historians), at the same time that he takes part in one of the first outposts of what would later become the “New Spanish Cinema”: That happy couple by Bardem and Berlanga. Now he also participates in some interesting co-productions such as La conciencia acusa (by the brilliant Georg Wilhelm Pabst) or Lo scapolo (by Antonio Pietrangeli) together with Alberto Sordi, and finally, he starts an incipient career as a director, with commissioned works of unequal fortune: In this sense, his version of Wenceslao Fernández Flórez”s novel El malvado Carabel stands out, as well as two excellent comedies in which he shared chemistry and a cast with the delicious Analía Gadé, one of his most recurrent partners, such as La vida por delante and La vida alrededor.
In line with the Spanish cinema of the sixties, his filmography as an actor and director was filled with comedies of all kinds such as: La venganza de Don Mendo, Adiós, Mimí Pompom, Ninette y un señor de Murcia, Crimen imperfecto or Un vampiro para dos, a parody of the Dracula films with José Luis López Vázquez and Gracita Morales.
Even in this period of eminently commercial works, there are exceptions such as his directing work in El mundo sigue (1963), a harsh naturalistic drama, inspired by the novel of the same name by Juan Antonio Zunzunegui, in which two sisters with opposing conceptions of life confront each other in the midst of Spanish post-war society, The first of his successes as a director, and El extraño viaje (1964), in which he portrays, with almost greater penetration than Berlanga himself, the stingy and oppressive climate of Spanish society under Francoism and which remains one of the all-time highs of Spanish cinema; both productions had tremendous clashes with censorship. On the other hand, it is now when he starts a professional relationship with another of his most emblematic partners, Concha Velasco, with the black comedy Crimen para recién casados (Crime for Newlyweds).
In the seventies, Fernán-Gómez became one of the most sought-after actors of the so-called Spanish Transition, with golden titles of those years such as El espíritu de la colmena, El amor del capitán Brando, Pim, pam, pum…. ¡fuego!, Mi hija Hildegart, Los restos del naufragio, Mamá cumple cien años or ¡Arriba Hazaña! With this he began a successful collaboration with the notable director Jaime de Armiñán and a close professional relationship with Carlos Saura, earning him a just prestige as an actor and director as well as recognition for his already long career. In 1976 he took part in a title of undoubted value, although not for the general public, such as El anacoreta, awarded at the Berlin International Film Festival. He also directed and starred in two successful productions for TVE (the telefilm Juan soldado and, above all, the series El pícaro), which are still in the memory of the general public. After Franco”s death and the legalization of the CNT-AIT, he was an active militant in the Sindicato de Espectáculos de Barcelona, participating in the Jornadas Libertarias de Barcelona in July 1977 with his partner Emma Cohen.
In 1981 he starred in a memorable film, Maravillas by Gutiérrez Aragón, and began to string together critical and public successes (La colmena, Stico, Los zancos, Réquiem por un campesino español, La corte de Faraón, La mitad del cielo and El viaje a ninguna parte). He finished the decade with excellent work in films that were not very well received but of high quality: Esquilache and El río que nos lleva. In 1986 he shot in Argentina a title to be taken into account, Pobre mariposa, by Raúl de la Torre, with an international cast (and this is also the decade in which he is most active in his work for TVE (Ramón y Cajal: Historia de una voluntad, Fortunata y Jacinta, Las pícaras, Juncal or Cuentos imposibles).
The 1990s witnessed the beginning of a period of less professional activity due to some health problems and, surely, lack of important roles for an actor like him. Except for Belle Époque and the Oscar for best foreign film, we must wait until 1998 to see him again in two films as different as important (each in its own way) such as El abuelo (Oscar nominated and a great box office success) and Pepe Guindo (a tribute-fiction to the great actor by an underrated but not mediocre director like Manuel Iborra). In between, he spent several seasons in the TV series Los ladrones van a la oficina, which would bring him and other great names in acting such as Agustín González, Manuel Alexandre or José Luis López Vázquez back to popularity. He then recovered his popularity with three great films (Todo sobre mi madre, Plenilunio and the popular hit La lengua de las mariposas).
More recently he filmed Visionarios, by Gutiérrez Aragón; El embrujo de Shanghai, with Fernando Trueba; Para que no me olvides, and what will probably remain as his last great performance in the splendid En la ciudad sin límites, by Antonio Hernández.
Marisa Paredes, president of the Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas de España, at the presentation of the tenth Gold Medal, described him perfectly: “As an anarchist, as a poet, as a comedian, as an article writer, as an academic, as a novelist, as a playwright, as unique and as consistent”.
He collaborated for thirty-five years with the ABC newspaper.
Also read, biographies – Johan Cruyff
Death
On November 19, 2007, he was admitted to the oncology ward of Madrid”s Hospital Universitario La Paz for treatment of pneumonia and died in Madrid two days later, on November 21, 2007, at the age of 86. He died in Madrid of colon cancer two days later, on November 21, 2007, at the age of 86. After being announced by Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero at the actor”s funeral chapel, on November 23 the Spanish government posthumously awarded him the Gran Cruz de la Orden Civil de Alfonso X el Sabio (Grand Cross of the Civil Order of Alfonso X the Wise). Also, the Mayor of Madrid Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón announced that the Centro Cultural de la Villa de Madrid will be renamed Teatro Fernando Fernán Gómez. At the funeral chapel his coffin was covered with a red and black anarchist flag, and he was later cremated in the Almudena Cemetery in Madrid.
Also read, biographies – Percy Bysshe Shelley
Festivals
Sources
