Actor Carmen Machi, best known for her role as Aida in the wildly popular Spanish series “7 Lives” and spin-off “Aida” as well as her pivotal roles in Almodóvar classics “Talk to Her” and “Broken Embraces,” received the 2026 National Film Prize at the San Sebastian Festival, a prestigious honor that has been granted to a bevy of Spanish greats, including Oscar winners and nominees Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Antonio Banderas, director Fernando Trueba (“Belle Epoque”) and El Deseo producer Esther Garcia, among many others since the Spanish Ministry of Culture launched it in 1980.
The award, presented by the Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts (ICAA), an agency under the Ministry of Culture, comes with a €30,000 ($34,437) prize.
In remarks before Machi came up to accept her award, Diego San José, the co-screenwriter of Spanish blockbuster “Spanish Affair” (“8 apellidos vascos”) in which Machi also starred, quipped: “I would say that Carmen is already part of our national heritage, like an aqueduct or like the Burgos Cathedral, but much better preserved than those two examples
“Besides, Carmen has something that neither an aqueduct nor a cathedral has, and that is that when we look at you, we see ourselves. Today, Carmen, as you go up to collect this award, you carry inside you all those women you have portrayed from the beginning: Your mother, your aunts and your neighbors accompany you.”
Machi also starred in “Celeste,” created by San José, which won her best actress as well as best series at Series Mania’s International Panorama last year. Superb in Carlota Pereda’s Sundance hit “Piggy,” Machi has demonstrated her chops for drama and melodrama, incarnating the oldest version of a heinously messianic mother in “La Mesías,” from Javier Ambrossi and Javirr Calvo, now behind “La Bola Negra.”
Spanish Minister of Culture Ernest Urtasun said that he had rarely received so many messages of delight when the ministry announced in June that the award would go to “a truly great actress of innate talent and extraordinary versatility,” whom he compared with such figures as Anna Magnani, the late Marisa Paredes and Julieta Serrano.
Said Machi: “I’ve always been fascinated by cinema,” relating how her bedroom was filled with clippings and stills of Marlon Brando and how she would hide behind the sofa at the black-and-white movies her parents were watching, and how, struck by a scene, she would run alone to her room and try to recreate scenes in front of the mirror, trying to feel what the protagonist felt, often ending up in tears.
“It was something that fascinated me. It gave me a strange sense of freedom. I was just a little girl. Then I would leave the room and go back to waiting. I never imagined that that game, which was a refuge to overcome my insecurity and my shyness, would become my craft and my way of life,” she confessed.
“This profession has given me a wonderful life. It is and has been the driving force of my happiness and also a balm for my darkest moments.”
John Hopewell contrinuted to this article.
Carmen Machi
Carmen Machi Credit: Caterina Barjau