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Pedro Almodóvar. Photo by Ruben Ortega..

Top 10 Remarquable Facts about Pedro Almodovar

Pedro Almodóvar Caballero (often known simply as Almodóvar) who was born on 25th September 1949 is a Spanish film director, screenwriter, producer, and former actor. His films are marked by melodrama, irreverent humour, bold colour, glossy décor, quotations from popular culture, and complex narratives. Desire, passion, family, and identity are among Almodóvar’s most prevalent subjects in his films. He came to prominence as a director and screenwriter during La Movida Madrileña, a cultural renaissance that followed after the end of Francoist Spain.

His first few films characterised the sense of sexual and political freedom of the period. In 1986, he established his own film production company, El Deseo, with his younger brother Agustín Almodóvar, who has been responsible for producing all of his films since Law of Desire (1987). Almodóvar achieved international recognition for his black comedy-drama film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), which was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film.

1. His father was a winemaker

Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz. Photo by JImaral..

Pedro Almodóvar Caballero was born on 25 September 1949 in Calzada de Calatrava, a small rural town of Ciudad Real, a province of Castile-La Mancha in Spain. He has two older sisters, Antonia and María Jesús, and one brother Agustín.

His father, Antonio Almodóvar, was a winemaker, and his mother, Francisca Caballero, who died in 1999, was a letter reader and transcriber for illiterate neighbours.

2. His family wanted him to be a priest

When Almodóvar was eight years old, the family sent him to study at a religious boarding school in the city of Cáceres, Extremadura, in western Spain, with the hope that he might someday become a priest.

His family eventually joined him in Cáceres, where his father opened a gas station and his mother opened a bodega in which she sold her own wine. Unlike Calzada, there was a cinema in Cáceres. “Cinema became my real education, much more than the one I received from the priest”, he said later in an interview.

3. Pedro became a filmmaker against his parents’ wishes

Against his parents’ wishes, Almodóvar moved to Madrid in 1967 to become a filmmaker. When the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, closed the National School of Cinema in Madrid, Almodóvar became self-taught.

To support himself, Almodóvar had a number of jobs, including selling used items in the famous Madrid flea market El Rastro and as an administrative assistant with the Spanish phone company Telefónica, where he worked for 12 years. Since he worked only until three in the afternoon, he had the rest of the day to pursue his film-making.

4. Pedro has wrote articles for major newspapers

Pedro Almodovar. Photo by Georges Biard. .

Almodóvar also penned various articles for major newspapers and magazines, such as El País, Diario 16 and La Luna as well as contributing to comic strips, articles and stories in counterculture magazines, such as Star, El Víbora and Vibraciones.

He published a novella, Fuego en las entrañas (Fire in the Guts) and kept writing stories that were eventually published in a compilation volume entitled El sueño de la razón (The Dream of Reason).

5. He bought his first camera at 22

Almodóvar bought his first camera, a Super-8, with his first paycheck from Telefónica when he was 22 years old, and began to make hand-held short films. Around 1974, he made his first short film, and by the end of the 1970s they were shown in Madrid’s night circuit and in Barcelona.

These shorts had overtly sexual narratives and no soundtrack: Dos putas, o, Historia de amor que termina en boda (Two Whores, or, A Love Story that Ends in Marriage) in 1974; La caída de Sodoma (The Fall of Sodom) in 1975; Homenaje (Homage) in 1976; La estrella (The Star) in 1977; Sexo Va: Sexo viene (Sex Comes and Goes); and Complementos (Shorts) in 1978.

6. His films have some recurring features

Photo by Unknown. .

“Almodóvar has consolidated his own, very recognizable universe, forged by repeating themes and stylistic features”, wrote Gerard A. Cassadó in Fotogramas, Spanish film magazine, in which the writer identified nine key features which recur in Almodóvar’s films: homosexuality; sexual perversion; female heroines; sacrilegious Catholicism; lipsyncing; familial cameos; excessive kitsch and camp; narrative interludes; and intertextuality.

June Thomas from Slate magazine also recognised that illegal drug use, letter-writing, spying, stalking, prostitution, rape, incest, transsexuality, vomiting, movie-making, recent inmates, car accidents and women urinating on screen are frequent motifs recurring in his work.

7. Pedro Almodovar is openly gay

Almodóvar is openly gay. He describes himself as having been actively bisexual until the age of 34. He has been with his partner, the actor and photographer Fernando Iglesias, since 2002, and often casts him in small roles in his films.

The pair live in separate dwellings in neighbouring districts of Madrid; Almodóvar in Argüelles and Iglesias in Malasaña. Almodóvar used to live on Calle de O’Donnell on the eastern side of the city but moved to his €3 million apartment on Paseo del Pintor Rosales in the west in 2007.

8. He formed his first production company in 1985

In 1985, Almodovar formed his first production company, El Deseo, with brother Agustin. The following year he directed Matador, which had at its center two characters for whom killing equals sex.

Retired bullfighting star Diego and Maria, a lawyer, are linked because of their shared desire. This film bucks many conventions and showed how Almodovar’s movies are full of interesting details.

9. His first big budget film is Law of Desire

Pedro Almodovar. Photo by Ruben Ortega. .

Almodovar directed his first big budget film in 1987, Law of Desire. This marked the first time Almodovar produced his own movie, which he would do many times in the future, but the film still received much state money.

Law of Desire was a love story with a triangle of homosexual and transsexual love at its center, again starring Banderas. Almodovar was criticized for depicting unprotected gay sex in the movie.

10. He has won many awards

One of the most internationally successful Spanish filmmakers, Almodóvar and his films have gained worldwide interest and developed a cult following. He has won two Academy Awards, and in January 2017 he was named as President of the Jury for the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. In 2019, he was awarded the Honorary Golden Lion at the 76th Venice International Film Festival just to name a few.