Actress María Galiana (Seville, 91 years old) wants to keep working. Looking back, she regrets having dedicated so much time to the series Cuéntame cómo pasó, that emblematic show aired between 2001 and 2023 about a middle-class family from Madrid living between the end of Francoism and the Transition. In it, the Andalusian played Herminia, the grandmother of the family clan: “The time I have spent as an actress, I have wasted it. Twenty-two years playing a grandmother on television… what a role! My goodness! So unlike my personality.” She also says she would have liked to do more films or play Shakespearean characters like Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. She compensates for this with an active theater career.
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VIDEO | At 91 years old, María Galiana shows regret for having spent 22 years with her role in the series ‘Cuéntame cómo pasó’:
— EFE Noticias (@EFEnoticias) September 14, 2026
“The time I have spent as an actress, I have wasted it. Twenty-two years playing a grandmother on television… what a role! So unlike my… pic.twitter.com/fFY1DgUXR6
Galiana, winner of a Goya Award for Best Supporting Actress for the film Solas (1999), if she has anything in common with grandmother Herminia López, it is firmness of character. She is not afraid to say that death is a nuisance, waiting is nonsense, and happiness a chimera: “It bothers me a lot to die. It’s horrible. Happiness does not exist. There is the satisfaction of a job well done and, in any case, of being serene and at peace.”
Another topic Galiana addresses is what she defines as the machismo of Spanish cinema, which she points out as a historical problem where there are still many more male than female role models: “In Spanish cinema I can give you a huge list of male protagonists: Javier Gutiérrez, José Coronado, Antonio de la Torre, Luis Tosar, Javier Bardem… And, on the other hand, there is one woman who has made a film and won an award, but there is no group of women who are working and are the leading stars of the film.”
On September 13, the Sevillian actress received the Honor Award at the Iridescent International Film Festival of Guadix (Granada), a recognition of her career whose film debut dates back to 1985 with the movie Made in Japan and at an unusual age (50 years). Galiana emphasizes her desire to keep writing pages in that story.
