Jaime de Armiñán, director of 'Mi Querida Señorita' and 'Juncal', dies at 97 | The truth

A sad closing of the filmography for an essential director of Spanish cinema, who was not satisfied with being behind the cameras and was also a playwright, novelist, screenwriter and columnist. This Monday, an author who was twice nominated for a non-English speaking Oscar for encyclopedias died at his home in his native Madrid at the age of 97. In 1973 he aspired to the statuette with his most popular film, 'My dear young lady', written with José Luis Borau and seen by almost 2 million viewers. He knew that he had everything to lose against 'The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie', by Luis Buñuel, which was competing for France. At least José Luis López Vázquez impressed George Cukor so much that he gave him a role in 'Viajes con mi aunt'.

In 1981, Armiñán returned to Hollywood with 'El nido'. He also had it impossible against Truffaut and Kurosawa, although in the end the Oscar went “for a very bad Soviet film, which made me very angry,” he lamented. The author of 'Juncal', one of the legendary Spanish Television series, portrayed the evolution of Spain through the thirty films that he signed as director or screenwriter. He had the example of his father, Luis de Armiñán, a journalist who charged thirty pesetas for each chronicle written on the front, at the height of the Civil War and who before, in the Republic, was civil governor in various Spanish provinces. He was also the son of Carmen Oliver, an actress whom he idolized and who read poetry to him when he was a child.

All his experiences with a nomadic and enlightened family are compiled in delicious memoirs that won the Comillas Award, 'La dulce España' (ed. Tusquets), in which he recognizes a sickly and in love child. In them he recounts the bombings in Salamanca, the good life in a bourgeois San Sebastián where white bread and chocolate abounded, or his devotion to bulls: one of the great moments in his life was when Antonio Bienvenido gave him a bullfight. . He always confessed himself to be “a republican, somewhat anarchist and rather an atheist.” He saw the plane in which General Mola was traveling crash and looked into Julio Romero de Torres' studio while he painted his gypsy woman.

After the adventure of the Civil War, Jaime de Armiñán enrolled in Law and saw all the forbidden cinema he could with his friend Luis García Berlanga. At 18 he accompanies his father, then a correspondent for 'ABC', to a Paris liberated by the Americans. He is amazed by the couples kissing on the street and they snatch 'La Internacional' and 'La Marseillesa' from him. “With an anthem like ours, how is Spain ever going to win anything?” asks the director, who considered his country “a regrettable place politically and culturally.” The 'Sweet Spain' thing was about a pastry shop from his childhood.

Armiñán entered cinema thanks to José María Forqué after having worked on the novel and the script: he signed 650 scripts, some of them very short because they were for television. She works in series such as 'Galería de Husbands', 'Confidencias' and 'Fábulas', and made her feature film debut in 1969 with 'Carola by Day, Carola by Night', a musical comedy to the greater glory of a twenty-year-old Marisol. Two years later she released 'Mi Querida Señorita', where José Luis López Vázquez was able to escape her comical persona by daring to be a woman. Instead of laughing at him, we understood his suffering in a film that is essential when it comes to reflecting the trans fact in Spanish cinema and that will be the subject of an upcoming version by Los Javis.

Married to Elena Santonja, painter, actress and pioneer of cooking shows on the small screen, with whom he had three children, Jaime de Armiñán received the Goya of Honor in 2014. The author of 'Stico', 'The Witching Hour' and 'My General' was a bold filmmaker, who was able to address daring themes in his films for the time in which they were filmed and who enjoyed a Spanish Television where creativity was valued on the rise, as in those 'Stories of censorship' made along with Chicho Ibáñez Serrador, who delighted President Adolfo Suárez and were later banned. The old professor who offers himself as a slave played by Fernando Fernán Gómez in 'Stico' reflects well the attitude of a filmmaker who dealt with heterodox loves – transsexualism, infantile erotic awakening, love relationships of veteran characters… – and who always went to his ball. . In his last public event, when he collected the Goya of Honor, he remembered José Luis Borau “for being an Aragonese and a jotero.” “Long live the jota, long live Aragon and long live Spanish cinema,” he said.