Pilar Lopez de Ayala

Pilar López de Ayala Arroyo from Madrid was born on September 18, 1978. She made her film debut at the age of 17 with a very brief role in El niño invisible and participated in a play. Although she studied acting and speech therapy, her best school was TV. “It is a medium in which you work in a very frenetic way, under great pressure and with a certain amount of daily stress, but that is also its positive side, the daily adrenaline rush of having to be on top of it”, comments the actress.

He participated in the series Yo, una mujer , Contigo pan y cebolla and Menudo es mi padre , but where he really gained notoriety was in Al salir de clase , a springboard to the stardom of various young performers known today ( Elsa Pataky , Sergio Peris-Mencheta , Alejo Sauras , Hugo Silva , Fran Perea , etc), where she played Carlota, a shy and very studious girl.

After leaving the series, she concentrated on the cinema, in titles such as Báilame el agua where she was a young woman who had left her home after fighting with her family and had settled in Madrid. In Besos para todos , by Jaime Chávarri , she played a young woman from Cádiz from a good family whose boyfriend abandoned her, when he found out that she was pregnant by him. In search of a father for her son, she was trying to win over a diligent student. Her role earned her a Goya nomination for Best New Actress.

His definitive consecration came in 2001 with Juana la loca , where he became a well-known historical character. Although the director Vicente Aranda gave the film a debatable approach, by presenting the daughter of the Catholic Monarchs as a woman obsessed with the sexual desire that Felipe el Hermoso caused her, no one failed to recognize the hard-working interpretation of the actress. For her role, she won the Goya for best actress and the Silver Shell in San Sebastián.

Unfortunately, López de Ayala did not know how to profit from the notoriety that the film gave him, since it took him four years to reappear on the screens, in the international co-production of the period El puente de San Luis Rey , which did not obtain the desired impact. . Obaba , an adaptation of a novel by Bernardo Atxaga by director Montxo Armendáriz , was also somewhat disappointing , in which the best –by far– was her interpretation as her teacher.

In David Trueba ‘s comedy Bienvenido a casa , she played the pregnant girlfriend of a photographer who was starting to work in a magazine, but she was on a much higher level than Alejo Sauras, the male lead. She also played Malatesta’s wife in Alatriste , one of the biggest blockbusters in Spanish cinema, but despite the fact that she appeared early in the credits, her appearance is minimal and almost anecdotal.

Pilar López de Ayala was also the best of Las 13 rosas , byEmilio Martínez Lázaro, about the famous thirteen young women executed in the postwar period. She shone with her own light as Blanca Brisac, a mother of a Catholic family. For the film by José Luis Guerin In the city of Sylvia she learned her dialogues phonetically in French. It was not the only time that she spoke that language, as she repeated it in the gala comedy Como los otros , where she was a surrogate mother hired by a gay couple. She also went through the Portuguese cinema at the hands of the very veteran Manoel de Oliveira , who in The strange case of Angélica made her the woman alluded to in the title.

Although he demonstrated his qualities for action in I just want to walk , the film went unnoticed. Luckily, she has regained success thanks to Lope , where she plays Elena Osorio, one of the two women with whom the famous leading playwright is in love. Right after this film, she has been hired by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo for his ambitious and promising thriller Intruders .

Pilar López de Ayala is so discreet that she never opens her mouth on personal matters. It has not even been known who is the lucky one that she has as a partner.