Pedro Almodóvar was born in Calzada de Calatrava, La Mancha, Province of Ciudad Real, administrative district of Almagro and archbishopric of Toledo, Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). Director, screenwriter, composer and actor, Pedro Almodóvar is the most celebrated Spanish director since Luis Buñuel and Carlos Saura.

At the age of 8 years he emigrated with his family to Extremadura, which is another Spanish province. There he studied and passed his first public examination in secondary school and finally took his school-leaving exam and university entrance qualification at a convent school of the Salesian Fathers and the Franciscan friars. His bad religious education only taught him to lose belief in God. In this epoch of his life he became addicted to the Movies.

When he was 16 years old he moved to Madrid alone, without his family and without money. He had only one concrete proyect: to study cinematic art and to make movies.

But it was already impossible to register at the Official School of Cinematic Arts, because General Franco had closed it. So he could not study the language (the Form, the Art). Therefore he decided to learn the fundamental principles and dedicated himself to life. At the end of the sixties, in spite of the dictatorship, for a provincial boy Madrid was a city full of culture and liberty.

He did a lot of sporadic jobs, but he could not buy himself a Super 8 Camera until he got his first serious job at the National Spanish Telephone Company Telefónica where he worked for twelve years as an administrative employee. During these years he passed his real formation. In the morning (from very early on) he was in contact with a social class he would never have got to know that thoroughly otherwise: the Spanish Middle Class in the beginning of the Age of Consumer Society. Its dramas and its misery. Everything was a gold mine for a future narrative writer. In the afternoon and in the evening he wrote, loved, acted with the group called "Los Goliardos", shot several Super 8 Movies. He collaborated on various underground magazines. He wrote stories and some of them were published.

His mother Francisca Caballero and his brother Agustín Almodóvar often appear in cameo roles in his movies. Lead singer of the infamous music duo "Almodóvar & McNamara", a legendary bizarre project that personified the image of "la movida madrileña" in the early 80's at Spain's capital.

He appears in that role in his own film Laberinto de pasiones (Labyrinth of passion), wearing women clothes and lots of black makeup. Most of his films, while featuring gay characters, are not gay-themed. Almodovar says "Even though I'm gay, I don't feel compelled to tell gay stories. I just tell a story that I'm interested in."

He was lucky that the premiere of his first commercial movie coincided with the birth of the spanish democracy. After one and a half years of daredevil shooting in 16 mm, in 1980 his first movie Pepi, Lucy, Bom... was shown for the very first time. From this moment on the cinematic art became his second nature. He wrote and directed. And he lived, enough for being able to invent new lively stories. His movies are now shown in the cinemas all over the world.

Almodovar's subsequent films include Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (which was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film, became 1989's highest grossing foreign film in North America and currently the most successful Spanish film ever). Almodovar is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Glauber Rocha Award for Best Director, Rio Film Festival, and L.A. Film Critics Association "New Generation" Award. His film All About my Mother received in 2000 a Golden Globe and an Oscar for best foreign language film.

His gay-themed films include Pepi, Luci, Bom; Labyrinth of Passion, a comedy starring his discovery, Antonio Banderas; What Have I Done to Deserve This?, his first American hit; and Law of Desire, his most prominent - and sexiest - gay-themed film, which features Antonio Banderas in a steamy nude scene.