Born in the dark days of Franco's dictatorship, Pedro Almodovar has depicted the freeing up of Spanish society across 20 colourful films powered by quirky and dramatic heroines. Long synonymous with subversive stories that mixed humour, transgression and lots of drugs and sex, at 67 with his thick hair gone grey, the director now often finds himself accused of not being "Almodovarian" enough in his later more serious films. Despite being a darling of France's Cannes film festival, whose organisers chose him recentlyy to lead this year's jury, he has never won its top prize, the Palme d'Or.
Almodovar burst onto the international scene with his 1988 Oscar-nominated Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, a dark kitschy comedy about a woman who had just been dumped by her lover and whose apartment becomes the scene of hostage situations and accidental overdoses. Once asked about the "masochism, homosexuality, masturbation, drugs, porn and attacks against religion" that seemed to characterise his films, he replied, "All of these themes that are considered taboo belong to my life. I don't consider them to be prohibited or scandalous," the director added.
One of the leaders of the Movida, the explosion of creativity that followed the death of longtime Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, Almodovar is openly gay. He soon became a symbol and chronicler of a modern and tolerant Spain that he also helped create. Born on September 24, 1949 in the arid region of La Mancha in the centre of Spain, Pedro Almodovar Caballero rarely talks about his father, who traded olive oil and wine off the back of a mule and who died in 1980, the year Almodovar's first commercial film was released. He grew up in the company of women and his mother has been a key reference throughout his life, with maternity a recurring theme of his movies, particularly in his 1999 masterpiece, All About My Mother. "My passion for colour is a response to my mother who spent so many years in mourning and blackness that goes against nature," he once said.
Almodovar was just 16 years old when he left home to move to Madrid. The Spanish capital's film school was closed by the repressive Franco regime at the time, but it was here that Almodovar discovered Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman. While working at Spain's public telephone company he plunged into Madrid's underground cultural scene and in 1974 he began making short movies with a Super-8 camera. His debut feature film, the 1980 camp comedy Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom, captured the newfound cultural and sexual freedom of the time. He was one of the first directors to include transsexuals and transvestites in his movies. Indeed, All About My Mother, which recounts a mother's search for her dead son's transvestite father, won the Oscar for best foreign language film.
The heroines of the majority of his films are passionate, determined women who must reinvent themselves to confront a crisis and often improbable plot twists that Almodovar loves to slip into his scripts. He won a second Oscar for best original screenplay for his 2002 film Talk To Her.
Almodovar's recent work has tended toward more dark and thoughtful thrillers and dramas. His latest, Julieta -- his biggest box office hit for years -- recounts a mother's excruciating 10-year wait for a daughter who abandoned her. To explain his new seriousness, he talks frequently of his life as an ageing single man who lives with a cat and his "ghosts". Some of those ghosts come from his childhood, when he would listen to his mother and the neighbours when they gathered to gossip and make lace.
