Actor Rosa Maria Sardà passes away at 78

Catalan actor Rosa Maria Sardà passed away on Thursday at 78, as Spain’s cinema academy confirmed. Last year Sardà revealed that she had cancer.

She was well known for her long career spanning five decades, with appearances in cinema, theater, and television.

Career

In her early career in the 1970s, Sardà became famous for her appearances on television, along with the Catalan comedy music band, La Trinca. In fact, she married one of the performers in the band, Josep Maria Mainat, although they separated later on.

In the 1980s, she began focusing on cinema, where she worked with Spain’s top producers over three decades. She starred in films such as ‘The girl of your dreams’ (‘La niña de tus ojos’, in Spanish), by Fernando Trueba, and ‘All about my mother’ (‘Todo sobre mi madre’), directed by Pedro Almodóvar.

In the last decade of her life, she focused on theater, although she had been taking part in plays for some 50 years.

Sardà was part of a family with several artists, and his brother Xavier is a well-known TV presenter and journalist. 

Awards

Among the awards won by Sardà include two Goya awards as supporting actress for ‘Why do they call it love when they mean sex’ (‘¿Por qué lo llaman amor cuando quieren decir sexo?’, in Spanish) in 1994, and for ‘No shame’ (‘Sin vergüenza’, in Spanish), in 2001.

She was also awarded with the Golden Medal of Spain’s cinema academy, and with the honor category of the Gaudí prizes, organized by the Catalan cinema academy.

Political views

In 1994, she also received one of Catalan government’s highest civil awards, the Creu de Sant Jordi, or St. George’s Cross.

Yet, in 2017, coinciding with the peak of the independence crisis, she gave it back – Sardà joined a manifesto signed by around a thousand Catalan intellectuals, professionals, and artists that called the independence referendum “a political fraud.”

Sardà took part in a number of political rallies of the Catalan Socialists. 

She was also the host of several galas of the Goya Awards, in which she was outspoken to distance herself from power and right-wing parties and to stand up for better conditions for the culture sector.

The actor also famously read aloud some texts by writers during the demonstration to reject the 2017 terror attacks in Barcelona’s La Rambla and Cambrils a few days later.