Marta Fernández-Muro, 2026 Feroz Honorary Award

The Spanish Association of Film Journalists (AICE) has awarded the 2026 Feroz Honorary Award to Madrid-born actress Marta Fernández-Muro, who will receive the statuette at the thirteenth edition of the awards ceremony on Saturday, January 24, in Pontevedra.

A scene-stealing performer and an essential face of Spanish cinema in the 1980s, AICE has bestowed its honorary award on an actress whose depth of work goes far beyond the comic roles that brought her widespread popularity.

Younger audiences may recognize her as Raúl Cimas’s mother in the acclaimed series Poquita fe, but Marta Fernández-Muro has enjoyed a career spanning nearly forty years, during which she has not only worked as a film, theatre, and television actress. She is also a businesswoman, a writer, and began her career as a classical ballet dancer.

An unconventional teenager in the 1960s, she was among the fans who went to Madrid’s Las Ventas bullring to attend the Beatles’ concert. Not only that: Franco-era NO-DO newsreels chose her face as an example of the “odd and frenzied” youth waiting for the British band at Barajas Airport.

It was a friend of her sister Teresa, filmmaker Ricardo Franco, who first gave her a role in cinema. She had begun studying theatre after seeing a newspaper advertisement for a school with, above all, Argentine students and teachers. From her mentor at the time, Martín Adjemián, Marta gained the conviction that she was “really good for something”: that she was, indeed, very talented as an actress.

Her unpretentious naturalness, free of extravagance and far removed from the famous and intense Stanislavski method, yet very close to real life, has earned her a reputation in cinema as “the luxury supporting actress who devours the camera.”

An actress in constant learning who refused to take the easy path. Tired of playing nuns — having had the misfortune of doing her first role exceptionally well in Los restos del naufragio (1978), alongside Fernando Fernán-Gómez and Ángela Molina — as well as sweet, innocent, and sometimes rather naïve maids, she moved to New York, where she studied with grounded, practical teachers such as Uta Hagen and Geraldine Page.

This training enabled her to work with authority in theatre alongside major figures such as Nuria Espert, Miguel Narros, and Adolfo Marsillach. Her love for the stage also led her to invest all her effort — and all the money she earned from cinema — in producing her own play: the monologue Un pasado en venta.

If her theatrical career is remarkable, her film résumé is breathtaking: she appeared in La colmena, Laberinto de pasiones, La ley del deseo, La comunidad, Volver a empezar — yes, an Oscar winner — and ¿Qué hace una chica como tú en un sitio como este?. In other words, she has worked with directors such as Mario Camus, Pedro Almodóvar, Fernando Colomo, José Luis Garci, and Álex de la Iglesia, as well as with Iván Zulueta on his singular cult film Arrebato, which fittingly connects her to the Feroz Awards that now grant her their fiercest and highest distinction: the Honorary Award.