Pedro Almodóvar, the director who turned transgression into tenderness

There is a scene near the beginning of Pain and Glory, Almodóvar’s 2019 semi-autobiographical film, where a middle-aged director watches an old Super-8 film he shot as a young man — and cannot quite connect the person who made it to the person watching it now. That distance, between the anarchic young man who arrived in Madrid with nothing but a camera and the director who has since won two Oscars, a Golden Lion, and the affection of two generations of European filmgoers, is the gap his entire career has been crossing.

Pedro Almodóvar Caballero was born on September 25, 1949, in Calzada de Calatrava, a small town in La Mancha — the same Castilian plain that Don Quixote set out across on his deluded adventures. His father made wine; his mother read and transcribed letters for illiterate neighbors. When he was eight, the family sent him to a religious boarding school in Cáceres, hoping he might become a priest. He became a filmmaker instead, which in Franco’s Spain was arguably the more transgressive vocation. When he arrived in Madrid as a young man, intending to study at the national film school, the school had been closed. He took a job at Telefónica, the national telephone company, and bought his first Super-8 camera with his first paycheck. The films came before everything else.

The Madrid he found in the late 1970s was in the middle of La Movida Madrileña — a cultural explosion that followed the end of thirty-six years of Francoist repression. Everything that had been forbidden was suddenly possible. Almodóvar’s early films were the Movida on celluloid: Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980), Labyrinth of Passion (1982), and the delirious drug-trafficking-nuns comedy Dark Habits (1983) were films that treated sex, drugs, transgenderism, and political absurdity as material for farce. They were made fast, cheaply, and with a specific joy that is not quite reproducible. Carmen Maura became the defining actress of this period. Antonio Banderas, barely out of drama school, appeared in several of them before anyone outside Spain knew his name.

International attention arrived with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) — a screwball comedy set in a Madrid apartment over the course of forty-eight hours that is also secretly a study of female solidarity and male abandonment. It earned Spain’s first significant Oscar notice in years. Almodóvar used the attention wisely. He and his brother Agustín founded El Deseo, their production company, in 1986, giving him the autonomy to develop his films without interference. The decade that followed refined his signature: the bright Sirkian colors, the Hitchcockian plot mechanics, the operatic emotions treated with complete sincerity.

The two films that defined his international reputation arrived in quick succession. All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre, 1999) won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, the César, the BAFTA, the Cannes award for Best Director. It is about grief and substitution and the strange ways women who have lost everything still manage to give. Talk to Her (Hable con ella, 2002) won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and is arguably his most structurally audacious film: two men care for two comatose women in parallel, and Almodóvar uses that arrangement to examine the ethics and the distortions of devotion. Both films center on what women do when the men they depended on disappear. Both are deeply strange. Both are also deeply good.

There is a standing argument about Almodóvar’s relationship to the women his films are full of. His defenders point to the specificity and dignity with which his female characters are rendered — transgender women, sex workers, addicts, mothers — all given interior lives and histories that most cinema denies them. His critics note that the director himself is not a woman, and that the male gaze operates in his work even when the subject is female experience. Almodóvar’s response, implicit in the films rather than stated in interviews, is that the distinction between looking at and looking with is the only one that matters — and that the camera’s relationship to its subject is an ethical question answered shot by shot, not once and for all. Whether this satisfies depends on the viewer. The argument is worth having.

Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria, 2019) was the film in which Almodóvar finally turned the camera directly on himself — or rather on a version of himself named Salvador Mallo, played by Antonio Banderas in a performance widely considered the best of his career. The film is about chronic pain, heroin, a creative block that has lasted years, and the slowly reopening wound of childhood memory. It won Banderas the Best Actor prize at Cannes. It won Almodóvar the rare acknowledgment that an artist’s most personal film can also be his most formally accomplished. The Cannes jury did not give it the Palme d’Or; Almodóvar, who has spent most of his career without one, has continued working as if the absence does not particularly interest him.

The Room Next Door (2024) was his first English-language feature — starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore as two women, former friends, brought back together by a terminal cancer diagnosis. It won the Golden Lion at Venice, the first Spanish film ever to do so. Almodóvar has since confirmed he is done with English and plans his next film in Spanish in 2027. In between, he made Amarga Navidad (Bitter Christmas), a self-reflexive tragicomedy about a filmmaker with writer’s block, which received its world premiere in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival on May 19, 2026 — seven days before this biography was updated. The film earned a 6.5-minute standing ovation and the Soundtrack Award. Pedro Almodóvar, at 76, is still in the middle of it.