Blanca Portillo
Blanca Portillo Martinez de Velasco came up through Spanish theatre and has never really left it, working as a director and producer alongside acting. She made her feature debut in Entre rojas in 1995, but what made her a household face in Spain was television comedy: Carlota in the sitcom Siete vidas, which ran for years and reached people who had never bought a theatre ticket.
Film reversed that image entirely. Pedro Almodovar cast her in Volver as Agustina, the neighbour who knows more than she says, and the performance is built almost wholly from restraint, a woman managing information she cannot share. He used her again in Broken Embraces as Judit Garcia, a producer whose loyalty is the film's real subject rather than its background. She holds a Goya Award for Best Actress.
Her range is wider than the Almodovar association suggests. In Captain Alatriste she plays Fray Emilio Bocanegra, an inquisitor written as a man, and does not soften him by a degree. In Goya's Ghosts she is Queen Maria Luisa, in a period piece about the Inquisition and what came after it. Boy Missing and Escape put her in thrillers, and La Fortuna moved her into prestige television. What connects all of it is a refusal to perform emotion outward. She plays people who are working hard not to show you anything, which is precisely why the moments something does escape them land as hard as they do.
Movies (7)
TV (2)
Where to start with Blanca Portillo
Go to Volver first. Almodovar's film belongs to Penelope Cruz, but Agustina is where its sadness actually lives, and Portillo plays her with a stillness that makes every other performance in the picture sound louder than it is.
Then Broken Embraces, the harder and colder of her two Almodovar films, where she plays a woman whose devotion has costs nobody around her ever acknowledges.
For the range, Goya's Ghosts puts her in Milos Forman's Inquisition drama as the Spanish queen, and Captain Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer casts her as a male inquisitor, which she plays without a hint of stunt about it. La Fortuna is the accessible television option, an Alejandro Amenabar treasure-hunt series with a light touch, and Boy Missing is the tight, nasty little thriller to reach for if you want her at her most contained.