Jorge Semprun

Born on December 10, 1923, Jorge Semprún Maura is the grandson of the prestigious conservative politician Antonio Maura, while his father, of firm Catholic convictions, was José María Semprún y Gurrea, civil governor of Toledo at the time of the Republic. During the Civil War, his father was ambassador of the republican government in The Hague, and at the end of the war he went into exile in Paris with his family. There, the young Jorge studied Philosophy at the Sorbonne University.

Affiliated with the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), after the Nazi occupation of France, Semprún fought with the Resistance, until he was arrested and deported to the Buchenwwald concentration camp. After the war, he was received as a true hero in Paris. He became part of the Central Committee of the PCE until he was expelled from the party, for dissenting from the official line of Santiago Carrillo and Dolores Ibárruri.

Since then he temporarily left politics, and concentrated on writing books such as “The Long Journey”, from 1963, in French, or “Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez”, in Spanish, about his discrepancy with the communists. In cinema he debuted in 1966 when he collaborated with Pierre Schoendoerffer, in the script for  Objectif: 500 millions . He had much more repercussion  The war is over , which he wrote for Alain Resnais , based on his own experiences in hiding when he was part of the PCE, with Yves Montand as a communist leader on a secret mission in Madrid.

Possibly Semprún’s most memorable work is the libretto for  Z , with some contributions from the film’s director, Costa-Gavras, although he was not credited as a screenwriter, and which adapts the novel by Vasilis Vasilikos. Follow the steps of an examining magistrate ( Jean-Louis Trintignant ) who is investigating the murder of a politician (Yves Montand) at the hands of some radicals, in collusion with various police officers.

For Gavras he also wrote  The Confession , again with Yves Montand and  Special Section . And he also wrote Yves Boisset  ‘s thriller The Assault , again with Trintignant in the lead. His most experimental work was Stavisky , written for Alain Resnais, which was a tremendous failure to the point that the director focused from then on on more conventional cinema. In his filmography, the interesting  A Woman in the Window also stands out , with Romy Schneider as an aristocrat in love with a political activist.

Semprún himself directed the documentary Les deux mémoires , about the Spanish exiles in France, where characters like Santiago Carrillo appear. Due to Semprún’s disenchantment with the PCE, the truth is that it is a more honest and intelligent work than one might expect, and less partisan and biased than this type of film tends to be. It was his only work as a director.

Divorced from the actress Loleh Bellon (mother of his son Jaime, also a writer, deceased), he joined Colette Leloup in 1958, with whom he had four other children.

His work for the cinema with more autobiographical elements was possibly the screenplay for  Las rutas del sur , directed by Joseph Losey , although the film is not one of the director’s best. For television he wrote the series  Los desastres de la guerra , which portrayed the War of Independence from the point of view of Goya, an immeasurable Francisco Rabal .

He returned to politics in 1988 when he received a call from the then Minister of Culture Javier Solana asking him if he kept his Spanish passport. “Why do you ask me?” he replied. “Because it is an essential requirement to be part of the Government. This is how he remembered the moment in which he found out that he was going to be appointed Minister of Culture of the socialist government of Felipe González, replacing Solana. Although this election was widely criticized because it did not He lived in Spain, he did a good job promoting cinema or as a mediator so that the Thyssen collection ended up in Madrid.However, Semprún was an independent man, who strove to maintain his integrity, and ended up having a constant confrontation with the leadership of the PSOE, specifically with Vice President Alfonso Guerra,

Convinced of the need for the European Union, he wrote “The European Man”, with Dominique de Villepin, former French Prime Minister, and “Thinking of Europe”, a compilation of articles on this subject.

In an article in El País in 2010, Semprún explained that he was far from “resigned to dying nor anguished by death, but rather furious, extraordinarily irritated by the idea that soon I will no longer be here, in the midst of the beauty of the world.” . With his death, an authentic memory of the most significant events of the 20th century is lost.