In February 2026 the Spanish film academy gave Gonzalo Suárez its honorary Goya for a career that had run since 1966. Eight months later he died at his home in Madrid on Tuesday, September 29, 2026. He was 92. His family confirmed his death to Spanish media.
Martín Girard
Gonzalo Suárez Morilla was born in Oviedo on July 30, 1934. Before he was a novelist or a director he was a journalist, writing about sport under the pen name Martín Girard. His first novel, De cuerpo presente, came out in 1963.
Into cinema
Suárez moved into film in the mid-1960s and was among the precursors of the Barcelona School, the group of directors who pushed against conventional Spanish cinema in that decade. His early films, including Ditirambo and El extraño caso del doctor Fausto (1969), were experimental, literary and hard to classify.
He directed more than 20 features. In 1975 he adapted Leopoldo Alas’s novel La Regenta, entered at the Moscow International Film Festival, and in 1985 directed Los pazos de Ulloa for Spanish state television. He also acted, playing a married writer in Pedro Almodóvar’s ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? (1984).
Remando al viento
His best-known film, Remando al viento (1988), followed Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley in the summer that produced Frankenstein. It featured Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley and won Suárez the Goya for best director.
Don Juan en los infiernos (1991) followed, then El portero (2000), about a goalkeeper in post-civil-war Spain, and Oviedo Express (2007), set in the city where he was born.
Honours
As well as the 1988 Goya, Suárez held Spain’s National Cinematography Prize and received the Nacho Martínez Award at the Gijón International Film Festival in 2003. The honorary Goya in 2026 recognised a body of work that moved between experimental cinema, commercial films and literary adaptation.
He had four children with Hélène Girard, among them the sinologist Anne-Hélène Suárez and the video game developer Gonzalo Suárez Girard. His brother, Carlos Suárez, was a cinematographer.
He began as Martín Girard and ended with a Goya in his own name.