Juan Diego, one of the essential

SCIAMARELLA

Juan Diego was not just an actor, he was a pillar on which the credibility, modernity, and dignity of our profession and, if you push me, of an important part of our country, were sustained.

Bertolt Brecht's phrase about the essentials is well known: there are people who fight one day and are good;

there are others who fight for a year and are better, but there are those who fight all their lives: those are the essential ones.

Juan was, without a doubt, essential.

Juan Diego Ruiz fought all his life for the dignity of our trade and of the people of our country.

His involvement in the 1975 actors' strike, which brought us the rest day at the theater, is well known.

That strike was also a brave fight against a dictatorship that, despite being in its death throes, kept its dark and repressive drive sharp.

My generation has grown up listening to the story of that other one that risked prison, censorship and prestige for its principles.

Those people laid the foundations of our current democracy.

They brought dignity to the comic craft and Juan Diego played a leading role in that journey.

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We spent a lot of time together in 2003 as we tried to prevent the invasion of Iraq and our country's involvement in that outrage.

His intelligence, his cunning, his integrity in those months won me over forever.

I tried to spend as much time as possible by his side to learn from a man who knew how to perfectly combine social commitment with his love for the acting profession.

In those months he told me that, when he was young, some colleagues called him Juan

instead of Juan Diego, because of the frequency with which he asked them to sign a manifesto for one cause or another.

And I also saw first-hand how he allocated the entire check that came from his image rights through AISGE to less fortunate colleagues, colleagues who had been out of work for a long time or had had an accident.

Juan was an actor 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

He was observant, meticulous, obsessive, and hard-working.

Without a doubt, he is one of the best actors we have ever had in Spain.

I was told that once, playing Saint John of the Cross, he became obsessed with finding the way to write his character and identified so much with his role that his own writing changed forever.

He lived life with all the intensity that only epic characters can and he enjoyed every moment of it.

the film by Víctor García León that we made together, was a turning point in my career and his first Goya award as leading actor.

His work in that film still seems memorable to me.

Today I can only thank you for having been able to share this wonderful journey with him.

More than once, on the street, some clueless person confuses him with my father: "How I like Juan Diego, your father, what a good actor he is!".

I have never corrected them.

Recently it happened to me again, while he was walking with my daughter.

Then she asked me: "Dad, why haven't you told him that Juan Diego is not your father?"

Deep down I think I have always received this confusion with a clear sense of pride.

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