Aitana Sánchez-Gijón and the Goya that came as an honour, never a prize

Aitana Sánchez-Gijón

Photo: Pedro J Pacheco / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 5, 1968 Rome, Italy
Occupation	Film and stage actress
Known for	The Machinist, A Walk in the Clouds, I'm Not Scared
Awards	Goya · Concha de Plata · Premio Max · Premio Valle-Inclán de Teatro · Medalla de Oro al Mérito en las Bellas Artes · Platino · Premio Feroz

Aitana Sánchez-Gijón keeps returning to rooms she has already lived in. At Madrid’s Teatro Español she once played Acacia, the daughter at the centre of Jacinto Benavente’s La malquerida, a girl whose stepfather’s desire turns a rural household into the scene of a killing. Now she has come back to the same theatre and the same play as Raimunda, the mother who has to face what happened under her own roof. Between those two performances sits one of the odder records in Spanish acting: an honorary Goya handed to her younger than any woman before her, and a single competitive nomination so far.

The Italian half of the story came first. Rome was where her father, Ángel Sánchez-Gijón, a Spanish history lecturer exiled from Franco’s Spain, had made a life with Fiorella de Angelis, a mathematics teacher from Pescara. The family moved to Madrid when she was a year old. Her first name came with a poem attached: she was named after her godmother, Aitana Alberti, the daughter of Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León, and Alberti wrote verses to mark the birth. She holds Spanish and Italian citizenship, and Italy would keep calling her back.

Television found her early. Pedro Masó cast her as Sisi, a lesbian teenager, in his series Segunda enseñanza when she was 16 — she had been born in Rome on 5 November 1968 — and small stage and film parts followed until Miguel Narros cast her as Acacia at the Teatro Español in 1988. The film that made her known was Fernando Colomo’s Bajarse al moro, released in English as Going South Shopping, in which she played Elena. Then came Ana Ozores in the 1995 television adaptation of Clarín’s La Regenta, a part that earned her a Fotogramas de Plata and the Spanish actors’ union award.

The same year brought the offer that could have redirected everything. Alfonso Arau cast her opposite Keanu Reeves in A Walk in the Clouds as Victoria Aragon, the pregnant daughter of a Mexican-American winemaking family in California. The Hollywood career the film seemed to open never became the centre of her work. What followed was a run of European directors: Manuel Gómez Pereira’s Boca a boca, then two films with Bigas Luna, La camarera del Titanic and Volavérunt. As the Duchess of Alba in the second, a film built around her death and the riddle of Goya’s naked Maja, she won the Concha de Plata for best actress at San Sebastián in 1999.

By then she was running the institution that would honour her a quarter of a century later. In 1998 the Academia de las Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas de España elected her president, succeeding José Luis Borau, and she held the post until 2000, the first woman to do so and the youngest person to hold it at the time. In 2000 she also sat on the jury of the Cannes Film Festival.

The next decade scattered her across languages. She was Anna, the mother in Gabriele Salvatores’s Io non ho paura; Marie, the waitress who is kind to Christian Bale’s sleepless factory worker in Brad Anderson’s The Machinist; Vera in Luis Puenzo’s La puta y la ballena; and a woman caught in a rural siege opposite Gary Oldman in Koldo Serra’s Bosque de sombras.

The theatre is where the record is plain. With her own company, Strion, active since the 1990s, and under directors such as Mario Gas, Joan Ollé and Tamzin Townsend, she moved from Genet’s Las criadas to Mario Vargas Llosa’s La chunga. Andrés Lima’s Medea was the summit. It brought her the Max award for best leading actress and the Valle-Inclán theatre prize, and Carme Portacelli’s staging of Tennessee Williams’s La rosa tatuada added another Fotogramas de Plata a year later.

Cinema’s ledger reads differently, and the gap flatters nobody. For some 35 years the Goya Awards, run by the academy she had once presided over, did not nominate her once. The first nomination came for Pedro Almodóvar’s Madres paralelas, in which she played Teresa, and it was for supporting actress; she did not win, although the Feroz and Platino awards did reward the role. In October 2024 the academy announced its Goya de Honor for her. She said she thought she was still too young for it. At 55 she became the youngest woman to collect one, at the ceremony in Granada in February 2025. The easy reading blames the industry. A fairer one adds that she spent long stretches on Italian productions, English-language genre films and the stage, all of them outside the sightline of the people who vote.

Television has kept her in front of a wide audience all the same. She played Doña Blanca Soto across Velvet and its sequel Velvet Colección, and Netflix’s hospital drama Respira cast her as Pilar Amaro in 2024. After Miguel Santesmases’s Tierra baja, released in 2025, Almodóvar called her back. In Amarga Navidad, known in English as Bitter Christmas, she plays Mónica, the assistant to Raúl, a filmmaker played by Leonardo Sbaraglia. Mónica takes a sabbatical to look after her girlfriend, Elena, and then confronts Raúl for writing Elena’s suicide attempt into his script. “Her main quality is caring for others, and that interested me a lot,” she told El Español at Cannes, and she widened the point to the women around artists: “We have been in the background, feeding and sustaining the creators.” The film opened in Spain on 20 March 2026 and played in competition at Cannes on 19 May.

On stage, the circle closed. Natalia Menéndez and Juan Carlos Rubio adapted Benavente’s play as Malquerida, Menéndez directed, and the production ran at the Teatro Español from 13 March to 26 April 2026, with Lucía Juárez as Acacia and Juan Carlos Vellido as Esteban, the stepfather. Sánchez-Gijón took Raimunda, 38 years after she had played the daughter on the same stage.

The production is still touring, and its next confirmed date is the A Escena season in Leganés, outside Madrid, on 13 November 2026. The honorary statuette is already on a shelf. The actress it was meant to sum up is back on the road, playing the mother of the girl she used to be.