Mary Santpere, a comic actress undoing gender during Francoist dictatorship
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Spanish comic Mary Santpere played in secondary roles at the beginning of Francoism in the 1940s but drifted towards protagonism in the last decade before the dictator’s death in 1975. The dictatorship’s censorship required feminine characters to be beautiful and passive, which penalised the representation of women with agency. Given that Mary Santpere started her film career in ‘counterpart’ roles before being the star of four films, one of the goals of this article is to assess whether her stardom came at a price. The hypothesis is that more stringent rules of behaviour were applied to actresses playing leading roles given that they were expected to conform to the regime’s model of womanly conduct. The text analyzes her films in order to detect recurring elements of her star persona, such as her imposing height, her exceptional blondeness in a country where brunettes abounded, and her absence of conventional beauty. It explores her secondary comic characters in the 1940s and 1950s and the four main roles of the 1960s that Mary Santpere played to contextualise her star-persona during the Franco dictatorship, and also looks at whether the personal gender performativity Mary Santpere exploited during the Francoist period can be read against the grain.
Source: Comedy Studies
Author: Maria Pagès
Institution: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Language: English
Topic: Spanish Culture and Identity
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7124967701