Nuria Espert, Actress of Air and Fire

Núria Espert, the grand dame of theater, has no intention of retiring. Three-quarters of a century dedicated to the stage are her credentials. Although she has announced several times her intention to exit the scene, she has never materialized her decision. At 89 years old, she still feels the thrill of the stage, the excitement of embodying other lives. Since she joined the Romea Theater company in Barcelona at the age of 13, Núria Espert's life has been inseparably linked to the stage, which has a healing effect on her. She has extracted all the beauty from the words of Phaedra, Medea, Bernarda Alba, Electra, Lucrecia, or La Celestina, women she has portrayed. A few days before premiering 'All Birds', a play by Lebanese-born playwright Wadji Mouawad, directed by Mario Gas at the Teatros del Canal, Espert will receive on October 12th the Lifetime Achievement Award granted by the Mapfre Foundation, an entity that honors the actress "for her unwavering dedication to art and her commitment to humanitarian causes."

She fell in love with theater before boys, who were indifferent to her as a young girl. By her mother's order, she learned solfège and dance while also practicing on stage. Her parents forced her to memorize verses, sometimes by Rubén Darío and other times horrendous rhymes, both in Spanish and Catalan. Muse of great stage directors from the legendary Víctor García to Lluís Pasqual, she was precociously discovered by Josep Maria de Sagarra when the teenage actress worked in 'cau d'arts', bars where workers and neighbors gathered to listen to amateur recitations. Sagarra, still astonished by what he had seen, managed to say: "This girl has guts like a bull."

Daughter of a carpenter and a textile worker, the actress was born in Hospitalet de Llobregat in 1935 in a poor and unhappy home where her parents eventually separated without arguments or shouting. She married at 20 with Armando Moreno, with whom she founded her own theater company. He encouraged her to learn from the best stage directors and aspire for the best roles. "My teacher is life and my gift is knowing how to listen," says this living legend of performing arts.

Her great virtue is that she dares with everything. She was the first woman to play Hamlet in Spain and liberated Sartre's texts from the confines of chamber theater where they remained locked up. During the dictatorship, she suffered censorship intrusions. "I lived through very difficult times, full of suffering and frustration but also times of clenching fists and moving forward," she said upon receiving an honorary Max award, referring to the ban on touring 'The Maids' by Genet, something that happened again with 'Yerma' by Lorca. Interestingly, censorship worked wonders for the production. The play toured stages in London, Paris, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Rosario, Córdoba (Argentina), and many more in Latin America.

She has a sixth sense for tracking talent and working with the best, although sometimes it makes her feel dizzy as when under Miguel del Arco's direction she tackled seven different characters in 'The Rape of Lucrece' by Shakespeare. She considers herself a woman who has done what she wanted sometimes successfully and other times not. "I have pressed with both hands to carve out a space. Sometimes I succeeded and was happy; other times I was defeated."

She has embodied all heroines of tragedy from Electra to Gigi although Medea is the role she has played most often. Those who know her best say she is disciplined loyal and witty although she does not strive to be cordial with those who displease her. Her great friend writer Terenci Moix described her as a woman of "air and fire." And the grandiose legendary Peter Brooks made the best allegory of her "She is like a glass of water that can freeze or boil in just one second."

In 1979 she took charge for two seasons as director of the newly created National Drama Center (CDN) where she prepared a program for María Guerrero which began to be exclusively nourished by Spanish authors In 1986 she started directing plays and operas such as 'Madama Butterfly', 'Electra', 'Rigoletto', 'La Traviata', 'Carmen', or 'Turandot'. She denies having clashes with singers' egos "No some colleagues tell funny stories but it didn't happen to me When I took charge of opera direction few women did".

Only one thing has forced her offstage: depression She doesn't even know how it happened It was an "ax blow" something that split her in two which she managed to overcome thanks to psychotropic drugs Now all alerts are activated A compulsive reader if she doesn't feel like reading something is really wrong.