He died this Saturday at the age of 91, as family sources have informed the Efe agency. He debuted on stage alongside Adolfo Marsillach and has performed works from dozens of classics, from Aesquilo to Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Zorrilla and Lorca; from Shakespeare to Sartre, Pirandello, Noël Coward and Harold Pinter, among others. For almost a decade, she had lived in retirement, away from the media.
Gemma Cuervo suffered from COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Just 12 months ago, in one of his few public appearances, he received the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts from Queen Letizia. In 2021, he received the Max de Honor award for a lifetime achievement, which also allowed him to bring theater to television, when theater was broadcast on television, in formats such as the legendary Study 1.
E, where this Barcelonan had been living since the sixties. In 2020, his career, a lifetime on stage, was recognized by the Spanish Federation of University Theater. There, in the Barcelona university theater he took his first steps before making his debut in the late fifties. He traveled the roads throughout Spain and appeared on all television screens giving voice and body to Lorca, Sartre, Camus, Buero Vallejo, Shakespeare, Miller, Galdós…
He never kept quiet about what he thought: “Bite my tongue, no. Speak it as best as I could, yes,” he said in , upon receiving the honorary Max award. He always declared himself anti-bullfighting. He also never felt less than a man. She did part of her career with her husband, they married in 1960 and in 1969 they founded their company. He always felt that he had his rightful place. “I would not have consented otherwise. I am very strict. What is it about a man taking advantage of a woman just because she is a woman? They said: ‘Gemma Cuervo is coming…! She was very warlike. I still am.'” she recounted in this newspaper.
Her daughter, the actress, taught her, she recalled, that things had improved in her profession, but not enough: “The man resists and the people who run the country don’t do much for it either. The man resists because the Joans of Arc exist,” she reflected.
In 1963 Gemma Cuervo, at the age of 26, filmed The world goes on with and played a memorable character in a masterpiece that could not be released. “She imagined herself on the opening night, on the Gran Vía, dazzling and applauded, like she used to see Sara Montiel. But things went wrong: the film, unbearable for that Spain, was abandoned by the hand of God and was not released,” .
In the summer of 1965, the Buenos Aires cinema in Bilbao and some other provincial venues programmed it so quietly that not even Fernán-Gómez, its producer, director and star, found out. “It would have been the film that would have launched me. It cut short my film career. Yes, later I did a lot of theater and television, but I never repeated a leading character like that on the big screen,” said the actress.
In the nineties she was Emilio Aragón’s mother-in-law in the current series, , and already in this century, her role in and . The trio she formed with Mariví Bilbao and Emma Penella brought her closer to the youngest people in Spain and Latin America. “She was from another planet,” Laura Caballero, screenwriter of the series, said of her when she called her for the role of Vicenta. With the death of Cuervo, radio patio also closes.
