Actor Manolo Solo dies, winner of the Goya for 'Tarde para la ira'

BarcelonaThe actor Manolo Solo, one of the most versatile and solid performers in Spanish cinema, died this Thursday from cancer at the age of 62, according to the Spanish Film Academy. Solo won the Goya for best supporting actor in 2017 for the thrillerTarde para la ira, by Raúl Arévalo, and was also nominated as a supporting actor for El buen patrón, Cerrar los ojos and B, la película, and as a lead actor for Una finca portuguesa, for which he was also nominated for a Gaudí. A chameleon-like performer, he could disappear into his characters and navigate from comedy to drama with the security and solidity of gifted actors.

Solo, born in 1964 as Manuel Jesús Fernández Serrano in Algeciras, received recognition late, after two decades of supporting roles in films, TV movies, series, and short films. He participated in promising debuts such as Astronautas (2013) by Santiago Amodeo, La flaqueza del bolchevique (2003) by Manuel Martín Cuenca, or El traje (2002) by Alberto Rodríguez, but also in more important productions such as El laberinto del fauno (2006) by Guillermo del Toro or El gran Vázquez (2010), a biopic about the cartoonist Manuel Vázquez, in which the actor very subtly portrayed a young Francisco Ibáñez.

The actor lived this career without success or recognition with some frustration. "For a long time, I embittered my life because a part of me thought I deserved more and I lived with the eagerness to be discovered, for someone to notice me," he confessed a few years ago to El Mundo. His situation improved when Alberto Rodríguez entrusted him with a supporting but rewarding role as a journalist in La isla mínima, the winner of the 2015 Goya awards. That same year, Solo starred in David Ilundain's magnificent B, la película, where he played Pablo Ruz, the investigating judge in the Bárcenas case. And shortly after came the role that changed everything, that of Triana in Tarde para la ira, which the director of that film, Raúl Arévalo, had offered him eight years earlier. It was a short role where he only appeared for seven minutes and was murdered, but the actor managed to give him a life and credibility that the Spanish academics recognized with the Goya.

The extreme distance between the rational judge that Solo played in B, la película and the raspy-voiced quinqui from Tarde para la ira highlighted the actor's ability to transform into any character. Isabel Coixet recruited him for Elisa y Marcela (2019), José Luis Cuerda for Tiempo después (2018), and Fernando León for El bon patró (2021), for which he was again nominated for a Goya for his sacrificial role as the right-hand man to the scoundrel businessman played by Javier Bardem. But the most important call he received in those years was from Víctor Erice, who, after three decades without filming, chose the actor to star in his return to cinema, the extraordinary Cerrar los ojos (2023), where an aged Solo plays a filmmaker looking for a friend of his, who has been missing for decades. It seems that Erice and Solo did not quite get along during filming, but the actor's performance is impeccable, and the scene where he sings My rifle, my pony and me is a classic of Spanish cinema.

The one in Cerrar los ojos could have been a perfect ending to his career, but he still had a great role: the geography professor abandoned by his wife in Una finca portuguesa (2025), whom chance leads to assume the identity of a gardener in a small Portuguese town. And it's not Solo's only great work that year: in 2025, he also gave a prodigious performance as Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado in Alberto Rodríguez's series about the 23-F coup d'état, Anatomía de un instante, who had previously gifted him a delicious role in another historical series, La peste (2018). Incombustible, Solo continued working until the very end, so much so that he leaves an unreleased title: Aquí, a co-production between France and Portugal that adapts a work by Nobel Prize in Literature winner J.M. Coetzee and which, for now, has only been screened at the Cannes Film Festival.