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PEDRO ALMODOVAR

‘We need a vote on the royals’: Pedro Almódovar

Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar said on Tuesday that Spain should hold a referendum on the future of the country's embattled monarchy.

Published: 12 June 2013 11:51 CEST
'We need a vote on the royals': Pedro Almódovar
Film director Pedro Almodóvar with Spanish actor Blanca Suarez who plays Ruth in Almodóvar's latest film. Photo: Ben Gabbe/Getty Images North America/AFP

"I feel sympathy for the King," said the famous director during a press conference in Los Angeles to present his new film, the comedy I'm So Excited.

"He has always been very nice with me so I don't want to cause him any problems," the Oscar-winning director told journalists gathered in a Beverly Hills hotel.

"But I think we should have the possibility of a referendum to ask the Spanish people what they think about the system and ask if they want a constitutional monarchy or not."

The comments came up in the context of a joke in the Spanish director's latest film about the alleged infidelities of Spain's King Juan Carlos.

Spain's King has been repeatedly linked in recent times to German princess Corinna zu Sayn Wittgenstein. Spanish media have described the two as "good friends".

"(The film) is a comedy," said the director from Spain's Castille–La Mancha region.

"Everybody is thinking and talking about these things in relation to the King and whether he has had romantic liaisons with other people.

"I thought this was a good moment to include the joke," he added.

Almodóvar told journalists that the perception of Spain's Royal Family had changed in recent years, especially in the wake of the publication of Pilar Urbano's book by Queen Sofia, La reina muy de cerca.

"That book shocked me," the gay director said on Tuesday.

"For me it was awful to find all these homophobic statements about gay marriage. I felt frustrated," he explained.

"Then came all the corruption around the Royal Family. Five years ago the problem was taboo in Spain. Nobody dared to talk about it," said the director,

"But now it's' on the street every day." 

Spain's Royal Family has seen its popularity fall in recent times, largely because of a high profile corruption case involving the King Juan Carlos' son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin.

Urdangarin — married to the King's second oldest daughter, the Infanta Cristina — is currently being investigated for his possible involvement in the diversion of funds from the charitable sports foundation, the Nóos institute.

Cristina is also in the firing line. A judge in Palma de Mallorca also demanded on May 24th that the tax authorities provide him with a report on Cristina's property and non-property assets, investment funds, financial assets and deposits, a copy of the order showed.

A poll run by Spain's left-wing El País newspaper in April showed that 53 percent of people surveyed disapproved of the way the 75-year-old King Juan Carlos was carrying out his functions, against 42 percent who approved.

That gave him an overall approval-versus-disapproval rating of -11, compared to +21 in December, a lower rating than the one received by tax inspectors or lawyers and the first time that he has received a negative rating. 

Felipe's approval ratings have also taken a hit but remain broadly favourable.

A majority of Spaniards, 61 percent, approve of Felipe against 33 percent who disapprove, giving him an overall approval-versus-disapproval rating of +28, compared to +37 in December.

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FILM

Banderas wins Cannes ‘best actor’ as Almodovar alter ego

Hollywood actor Antonio Banderas has portrayed Zorro and Pablo Picasso but he is above all the go-to actor of Oscar-winning director Pedro Almodovar, who launched his hugely successful film career in Spain in the early 1980s.

Published: 26 May 2019 10:15 CEST
Banderas wins Cannes 'best actor' as Almodovar alter ego
Spanish actor Antonio Banderas holds his Best Actor Prize in Cannes on Sunday. Photo: LOIC VENANCE / AFP
And it was the 58-year-old's nuanced portrayal of Almodovar's alter ego in the director's “Pain & Glory” that won him the best actor award at the Cannes film festival — his first major award.
 
Sporting Almodovar's spiky hair and colourful clothes, he plays the movie's central character, an ageing Spanish director who is plagued by physical and psychological frailty who revisits childhood memories.
 
Almodovar, 69, has repeatedly said Banderas gives the “best performance of his life” in the film, which ran in competition for the Palme d'Or top prize. And on accepting his award, Banderas dedicated it Almodovar, who has cast him in eight films and helped make him a global box office draw.
 
“I respect him, I admire him, I love him, he's my mentor and he's given me so much in my entire life that this award, obviously, has to be dedicated to him,” he said.
 
After decades in the profession, Banderas said it was “mindblowing” to have won his first major award.
 
“After 40 years of being a professional actor, I've been nominated for practically everything except the Oscars, and I never got on the stage,” he said, citing four nominations for the Golden Globes and two for an Emmy among a string of others that never ended with an award. 
 
“So to get up there tonight was not very good news for my cardiologist!” he quipped in a nod to the heart attack he had in 2017 after which he had three operations. 
 
 
'There's pain but also glory'
 
But Almodovar, too, has gone decades without winning the big Cannes.  Over the past 20 years, he has had six films in competition at Cannes but never taken home the Palme d'Or and was conspicuously absent from Saturday night's ceremony, which Banderas said added a note of sadness to his win. 
 
“I would have loved to have Pedro here, that's the truth, but you know, this is the way this profession goes,” he said, pointing again to the theme at the heart of the film: pain and glory. “There is a lot of sacrifice and there is pain behind being an actor or being an actress, but also there are nights of glory, and this is my night of glory.” 
 
When Banderas began his acting career he “was a passionate animal who impressed just by his presence”, Almodovar told Spanish film magazine Fotogramas earlier this year.
 
“But now he has matured (after his health scare) and even though he is full of vitality… I can see in his face the experience of someone who knows that he could be dead”, he said. 
 
Speaking to Spain's Cadena Ser radio, Banderas said he loved the director because he had made him “reflect on a huge number of things throughout my life”.
 
Back in 1987, Almodovar got him to play a gay killer in “Law of Desire” at a time when depicting crime in movies “was morally accepted” while two people sharing a same-sex kiss “was spurned as anathema”, he said. 
 
'A very romantic face'
 
During the summer of 1980, Banderas said goodbye to his teacher mother and policeman father and boarded a train for Madrid where he wanted to “invent” himself. At the time, he was not quite 20. 
 
The following year, Banderas, then an actor at the National Theatre in Madrid, was sitting in a cafe when a man approached and said: “You have a very romantic face, you should make movies.”
 
That man was Almodovar, who went on to give him a small role in his 1982 screwball comedy “Labyrinth of Passion”, which celebrated the hedonistic culture and sexual freedoms that erupted in Madrid following the death of longtime dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.
 
Banderas describes Almodovar as “a genius” who is extremely demanding. Under his direction, he played a frustrated torero in the 1988 film “Matador”, a mental patient who kidnaps a porn actress in the 1990's “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” and a psychopathic doctor in 2011's “The Skin I Live In”.
 
Despite not speaking English, he moved to the United States in the 1990s. His first big success in English was in Jonathan Demme's 1993 film “Philadelphia” in which he played a lover of Tom Hanks' AIDS-infected lawyer.
 
He also starred alongside Tom Cruise in the 1994 film “Interview With the Vampire” and Anthony Hopkins in “The Mask of Zorro” four years later. He got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005.
 
Own theatre
 
Banderas's love life has been closely followed by the gossip press which said he divorced a Spanish actress in 1996 to start seeing American filmstar Melanie Griffith whom he met on the set of the 1995 romantic comedy “Too Much”.
 
The couple, who have one daughter, divorced in 2015 after 19 years of marriage. Since then, Banderas has been seeing Dutch-German actress Nicole Kimpel whom he reportedly met at the Cannes film festival.
 
Last year, he spent hours in makeup every day to play Picasso in the TV series “Genius”. Like Picasso, Banderas grew up in the southern city of Malaga, where he participates each year in one of its annual Easter processions and where he is very involved in the theatre world with hundreds of students. 
 
Later this year, he will open a theatre there. 
 
By AFP's Hazel Ward
 
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