2023-08-11 17:25:25
Next August 28 will mark the 102th anniversary of the birth in Lima (Peru) of Fernando Fernán Gómez, a man who made the two dreams he had as a child come true: to be an actor like Jackie Cooper and a writer like Emilio Salgari. His two hundred films as an interpreter eclipse the twenty feature films he directed, as well as his brilliant condition as a writer, columnist, author and theater director.
His death in 2007 at the age of 86 triggered tributes and praise. The Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, the National Film and Theater Awards, six Goyas, the Gold Medal of the Film Academy and the best actor awards in Berlin and Venice attest to the monumental legacy of a show business man who ended up as an academic of the tongue. Now, his archive and that of his partner since the 1970s, the actress and writer Emma Cohen, who died in 2016, have been acquired by the Ministry of Culture.
The valuable legacy is added to that of other filmmakers who in recent years have come to be guarded by the Spanish Film Library for its conservation and dissemination: Luis García Berlanga, Iván Zulueta and José Luis Cuerda. The acquisition occurs thanks to the agreement of Culture with the owner of the archive, Helena de Llanos, granddaughter of Fernán Gómez and his first wife, María Dolores Pradera, through a double process of purchase and donation.
De Llanos settled in 2015 in the Algete chalet, north of Madrid, which the director shared with Emma Cohen for 36 years and classified his personal archive. The result of this work is his documentary ‘Journey to some part’ and ‘The great book of Fernando Fernán Gómez’, a volume edited by Blackie Books that includes photographs, extracts from the literary work and press clippings that are part of the archive acquired by Culture.
Fernando Fernán Gómez at his house in Algete in 1995. Efe
The 252 boxes and other objects belonging to Fernán Gómez and Cohen are already in custody at the Spanish Film Library. The bulk of the archive includes film, theater and television scripts, filming sheets and sequences, drawings, storyboards, notes, novels, poems, documentation on censorship and plots and ideas for projects.
In addition to professional documentation, there are also personal writings by both creators, such as Fernán Gómez’s school booklets and his university student card. In addition to the letters of condolences addressed to Emma Cohen by personalities from the world of politics, culture and art, correspondence of great historical value is added. The author of ‘The trip to nowhere’ kept drawings, photographs, press clippings, newspapers and photocopies of articles with interviews and information about his work. The content of the legacy will be announced next September, when the archival description is completed by the technicians of the Spanish Film Library.
Storyboards a acuarela
Helena de Llanos discovered when she settled in her grandfather’s house that the protagonist of ‘Balarrasa’ had always written, she even found a staged play at the age of 17, in the middle of the Civil War. She also painted, as evidenced by the ‘storyboards’ of her films in watercolor. Among his discoveries, a cassette with the interview that Emma Cohen did to Fernán Gómez shortly after they met, the trunk of the director’s mother, the actress Carola Fernán Gómez, full of photos and newspapers, and the script for ‘La Puerta del Sol’, one of the films that was never able to shoot.
Emma Cohen and Fernando Fernán Gómez in an image provided by Filmoteca Española.
“It is a very large, enormous and multifaceted archive, just like the two of them were,” describes Helena de Llanos, who carried out a first inventory by folders ranging from a few pages to others of about two hundred. «From Fernando I will have inventoried more than a thousand folders and from Emma more than three hundred. Things have continued to come out until recently, books in a drawer… That was his level of compulsive creation ».
It was Emma Cohen who encouraged Helena de Llanos to investigate the archive of a total artist. With the death of the actress and writer, her work extended to her creative memory. “This is the legacy of one of the most interesting couples of creators in Spanish culture and cinema”, remarks the Ministry of Culture, which will make available to all “one of the most important and valuable personal archives of this institution ».
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