Rosa Maria Sarda

Born on July 30, 1941 in the same city, Rosa Maria Sardà i Tàmaro came from a very humble family. She has always felt the acting vocation: “As a child I loved the theater and played actresses before anything else,” she declared. Despite everything, from the age of 14 she began to practice the most diverse professions to help her family get ahead. “If you were poor you had to wake up.”

One of his occupations for a living was selling encyclopedias. “At that time she was already pointing out ways as an actress, because she went house to house convincing everyone that the collections she sold were basic in her life,”  Álex de la Iglesia commented on her .

A late actress, self-taught, she did not achieve her dream of debuting in the theater until she was 24 years old, when she was recruited by the company led by  Dora Santacreu  and  Carlos Lucena  to represent “Marriage Dinner” by  Alfonso Paso . Little by little, she made a name for herself on the stage until she became one of the best-known actresses in her land, where she filled the theaters with works such as “Duet per a violi” or the Catalan version of “I get off in the next one, And you?”, by  Adolfo Marsillach .

Despite her numerous television appearances, she was slow to move on to the cinema, because although in 1970 she appeared very briefly in the comedy  El certificado , she made her official debut in 1981, as a secondary in  El vicari d’Olot , by  Ventura Pons . And it is that she considers herself above all a theater actress. “I married him very young, and then, already in maturity, I became an adulteress because of the cinema,” the actress explains humorously.

Starting in the 1980s, more was lavished on the big screen, in titles such as  Moros y cristianos , Luis García  Berlanga,  The girl with your eyes  or  My mother likes women . Although she is almost always called on for comedies, Ventura Pons relies on her dramatic qualities, in titles such as  Actresses ,  Caresses ,  Amigo/amado  and the tragicomedy  Anita Doesn’t Lose the Train , where she was a box office hitter who, after three decades of work, takes early retirement when the local. She was also the mother of  Penélope Cruz  in  Todo sobre mi madre , by  Pedro Almodóvar .

On the small screen it became extremely popular. First on the Catalan circuit with “Per molts anys” and later throughout the country with “Ahí te quiero ver”, which combined interviews with funny skits, such as those in which she played a woman who had completely annulled her husband –Enric Pous– to whom he said that “Honorato, shall we put on the TV for a while?”. “They remember me just for that show, because people just basically watch TV. Few go to the theater, but they remind me of “Mother Courage” and other plays,” says the actress.

Rosa Maria Sardà received a very hard blow when one of her brothers died of AIDS in the 1980s. Another brother, Javier Sardà, became one of the greats of Spanish radio and later took television by storm. She married Josep Maria Maint who became famous as a member of La Trinca, a trio of satirical singers. They divorced but they were the parents of a child, Pol Mainat, who would follow in the interpretative footsteps of her mother, and coincided with her in the series  Abuela de verano .

In addition to proving her worth with roles like the mother of  Laia Marull , in  Te doy mis ojos , Rosa Maria Sardá has won two Goya awards for best supporting actress for the films  Why do they call it love when they mean sex? and  Shameless . In addition, she demonstrated her enormous professionalism as the presenter of the gala for these awards on several occasions.

The Film Academy awarded him the Medal of Honor in recognition of his artistic career. “Rosa Maria Sardà is to Spanish cinema what  Humphrey Bogart is  to film noir”, said Álex de la Iglesia about her, due to her character as an icon of Spanish cinema. Although she was flattered, he replied to De la Iglesia. “I didn’t expect it, but I thought you were calling me to offer me a movie,” said Rosa Maria Sardà, who has subsequently not stopped making jokes about it. “It is an honor to be compared to Bogart even though I am not a mythomaniac at all. Of course, it annoys me a bit when they compare me with men, there are other models, like  Marilyn Monroe , with whom I keep more parallels”.