Maria Dolores Pradera

Born on August 29, 1924 in the capital of Spain, María Dolores Fernández Pradera barely had contact with her father, who had businesses in Chile, where they went to see him every year. “It took her to arrive by boat at that time twenty-odd days, almost thirty.” She died at the age of 49, when she was going to return with her family to Spain, where the Civil War broke out shortly after. At the end of the contest, the girl could not wait to finish her studies at the institute to begin to dedicate herself to interpreting on the scene. In the 1940s, she began her journey in the cinema with titles such as  Yo no me casado  (1944), but she triumphed above all with  Altar Mayor  (1943) and  Inés de Castro  (1944), where she played Doña White of Navarre.

In 1947, she married the actor and writer  Fernando Fernán Gómez , with whom she had worked on  Los habitantes de la casa deshabitada  (1946). Despite the fact that they had two children, Fernando and Helena, they ended up separating ten years later. “Everyone asks me the reason for the breakup. Once I asked Fernando and we didn’t know it ourselves,” she joked in interviews, since humor was always the main hallmark of her in person. . “Maybe we rushed, I dreamed of growing old with him.”

Despite the fact that he shot movies at a good pace, with successes such as  Embrujo  (1946),  María Antonia La Caramba  (1950) and  Zalacaín el aventurero  (1955), he never left the theater scene, with great successes such as a staging of “La Celestina “, which triumphed at the Eslava Theater in Madrid, and at the Theater of Nations Festival in Paris.

After the film  La orilla  (1970),  María Dolores Pradera  decided to retire forever from acting to focus on her career as a singer, triumphing with her very personal deep voice, accompanied by Julián and Santiago López Hernández, Los Gemelos, a duo of instrument experts. rope, who abandoned their own career to become their shadow. She achieved enormous success in Spain and Latin America –where she was nicknamed La Dama de la Canción–, with songs like “Toda una vida”, “La flor de la canela” “Amarraditos” or “En una rincón del alma”. 

He did not like to talk about her in interviews. “I’m not interesting. I know what an interesting person is because throughout my life I have met many. Poets, composers, writers…”, she commented. She was awarded the National Theater Award, the Fine Arts Medal, as well as the Lara Award (1992), the Madrid Gold Medal for Artistic Merit (1987) and the Orquídea Award (1993).