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, has died of cancer this Thursday 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 leading actor for Una quinta 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 confidence and solidity of gifted actors.

Solo, born in 1964 as Manuel Jesús Fernández Serrano in Algeciras in 1964, recognition came to him 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 where the actor very subtly played a young Francisco Ibáñez.

The actor lived with a certain frustration this career without successes or recognition. "For a long time I embittered my life because a part of me thought I deserved more and lived with the longing to be discovered, for someone to notice me," he confessed a few years ago to El Mundo. His situation began to improve when Alberto Rodríguez, with whom he had already worked on El traje and Siete vírgenes, entrusted him with a secondary but rewarding role as a journalist in La isla mínima, the winner of the 2015 Goya Awards. That same year, Solo starred in the magnificent B. La pel·lícula, by David Ilundain, where Solo 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 that only appeared for seven minutes and he died murdered, but the actor managed to give it 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 pel·lícula and the gruff-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 buen patrón (2011), for which he was nominated for a Goya again 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 directing, chose the actor to star in his return to cinema, the extraordinary Cerrar los ojos (2023), where an aged Solo plays a filmmaker searching for a friend who disappeared decades ago. It seems Erice and Solo didn't 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 moment in Spanish cinema history.

The one in Cerrar los ojos could have been a perfect ending to his career, but he still had a great role ahead: the geography professor abandoned by his wife in Una quinta portugesa (2025), who by chance assumes 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 Gutiérrez Mellado in the series about the 23-F coup d'état, Anatomía de un instante, by Alberto Rodríguez, who had previously gifted him a juicy role in another historical series, La peste (2018). Incombustible, Solo continued working until the last moment, so much so that he leaves a title pending release: 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.