Javier Bardem to Receive 2023 San Sebastian Donostia Award

Javier Bardem is the first recipient of San Sebastian’s prestigious Donostia Award for this year’s 71st edition.

He will accept the prize, San Sebastian’s highest accolade, granted for career achievement, at the festival’s opening gala on September 22. His image will also feature on the poster of this year’s edition, unveiled today in San Sebastian.

More from Variety

• 'Lyle, Lyle Crocodile' Set for China Theatrical Release

• 'Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile' Review: Shawn Mendes Voices the Beloved Kids' Character in a CGI-Meets-Live-Action Fable That's Agreeable but Formulaic

• Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem to Reunite for Apple's Animated Musical 'Spellbound'

The only surprise about Bardem’s Donostia Award is that it hasn’t come earlier. A rugby player for Spain’s national team, Bardem first came to fame as a local village hulk playing opposite his now spouse Penélope Cruz in Bigas Luna’s 1992 flamboyant social critique “Jamón, Jamón.”

Bardem wanted, however, to be an actor, not a sex symbol. Refusing to be typecast, his full international breakthrough came in 2000 thanks to a tearaway performance as gay Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas in Julian Schnabel’s “Before Night Falls,” and in Spain, for his role as a going-to-seed unemployed former factory worker in Fernando León Aranoa’s “Mondays in the Sun” (2002).

Following an Oscar nomination for “Before Night Falls,” Bardem has gone on to snag three more Academy Award nominations and a supporting role Oscar and BAFTA win for 2008’s “No Country for Old Men.”

A member of one of Spain’s most famed acting dynasties – his grandfather, Rafael Bardem, and mother Pilar Bardem were both distinguished actors – Bardem has won more big acting awards than any other Spanish actor alive. The only actors who come close are Cruz and Antonio Banderas.

From his family he has also inherited left wing political convictions – his uncle Juan Antonio Bardem (“Calle Mayor,” “Death of a Cyclist”) was one of Spain’s most famous director critics of the society Francisco Franco’s regime created, his mother a lifelong activist.

Bardem has channelled these convictions into doc feature production, in partnership with producer-director Alvaro Longoria, their “Sons of the Clouds: The Last Colony,” championing the cause of the Sahrawi people – winning Bardem a producer’s Spanish Academy Goya Award, one of eight in a now over 30-year-old career.

Best of Variety

• Emmy Predictions: Guest Actress (Drama) -- Melanie Lynskey and Anna Torv From 'The Last of Us' Challenging 'Succession' Women

• Tony Predictions: Best Musical -- Four Stand Poised to Give ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ Some Competition 

• This 'Fast and Furious' Arcade Cabinet Allows You to Step Behind the Wheel as Dom Toretto

Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Click here to read the full article.