Spanish VIPs
María Galiana Medina (Born 1935)
Maria Galiana is a very wellknown Spanish actress with an unusual professional background. She was a secondary school teacher throughout her working life, retiring in 2000 at the age of 65. Although she had always enjoyed amateur theatre, she was in her sixties when she was “discovered” as a professional actress, combining the two careers until her retirement from teaching. Since then she has continued to work tirelessly in cinema, television and theatre and has become a household name.
María Galiana has a degree in Philosophy and History and was a History and Art History teacher in various state secondary schools in Sevilla. She was a strict but committed teacher who worked hard to get her students through their examinations. Her natural ability to communicate, her appreciation of language and her ability to put herself in other people’s shoes, were the qualities developed in her teaching career which made acting a natural step forward.
In 2000, the year of her retirement, she was awarded a Goya (the Spanish equivalent of an Oscar) for her role as best supporting actress in “Solas”, a film about loneliness and poverty in which she played a mother and long-suffering wife. However, her most famous role has been as the grandmother in the longstanding Spanish drama series “Cuéntame Cómo Pasó” (Tell Me How it Happened). This series has been running since 2001 and traces the lives of a typical middle-class Madrid family through the sixties, seventies and eighties in Spain. As the family deals with all the upheavals and changes around them, the grandmother, Herminia, played by María Galiana provides a solid rock of old-fashioned values of forbearance and common-sense. Such is her believability in the role, that she is often referred to as “La abuela de España” – the grandmother of Spain.
As well as other television and film roles, María Galiana has more recently returned to the theatre. Her current work “Conversaciones con Mamá”, performed with fellow “Cuéntame” actor Juan Echanove, has been performed in cities, towns and villages throughout Spain. In a recent interview María Galiana said that she was tired of being typecast as a grandmother and was seeking other roles.