The actor from Pontevedra, Celso Bugallo Aguiar, died this Saturday in Pontevedra. Born in Vilalonga (a district of Sanxenxo), he would have been 79 years old on January 1st. Bugallo had a long theatrical career, but it was not until the age of 52 that he made his film debut under José Luis Cuerda in The language of butterflies. At that time, he began to make up for lost time in the audiovisual field and his career ended with more than fifty jobs in cinema and series: last year he released the mini-series The Asunta case and the horror film Rocafort station.
Since then, he has become one of the hardest-working supporting actors in Spanish cinema thanks to titles such as Mondays in the sun, by Fernando León de Aranoa, and The life that awaits youby Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón. With Alejandro Amenábar, he won his first Goya Award for Best Supporting Actor with at sea, playing the brother of Ramón Sampedro, and with Fernando León he repeated it several times and obtained a second nomination for the Goya with The good boss.
After his film debut with Cuerda, his appearance in Firewood (2001) and chapters of series such as Journalists, High tides And Galicia express, It was León de Aranoa who allowed Bugallo to acquire a certain popularity, for his painful role of Amador in Mondays in the sun. Bugallo adapted the character to his personality, austere and simple, and this gave flight to the role.
His Galician nature and his ease in drawing these dry and bitter characters, who hid within them a tumultuous past and vital burdens, opened the door to filming in his autonomous community as The carpenter’s pencil or other regions of northern Spain like The life that awaits you, by Gutiérrez Aragón.
In 2004 came at sea, by Amenábar, in which he plays José Sampedro, the man who does not understand the decision to seek the death of his quadriplegic brother. With this character he won the Goya and the drama reached the Oscars, where the film won the statuette for best foreign film, currently called international film.
Oddly enough, Bugallo lived for many years far from northwest Spain. The actor studied alone until the age of 10 at the Vilalonga school. His father, a mechanic and fitter, was imprisoned under the Franco regime and, upon his release in the 1950s, the Bugallos decided to emigrate with their four brothers to Bilbao. From there they later moved to Logroño, looking for a climate conducive to their mother’s health. In Bilbao, Celso Bugallo saw Rebel without a cause and decides to become an actor, captivated by James Dean’s performance. In Logroño, he built his career on stage. And when he married a girl from Portonovo, he returned to Galicia in 1978, where he founded the Olimpo theater company.
Cinema came later, in 1998. “I remember I was in Amsterdam and José Luis Cuerda was looking for me. They called my mother and she was the one who told me that Cuerda was looking for me for a job, and I ran to Galicia! We both had a lecture at Allariz and he said to me, “You need to cut your hair.” There I met José Luis and Fernán Gómez. It seemed like a miracle to me,” he said in 2020 in The Voice of Galicia.
He had a long and fruitful collaboration with Fernando León.
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