Interested in the lives & works of famous Spanish women? Want to know about the most famous achievements of Spanish women? Our guide to famous Spanish women gives you the facts & information you want to know.
María del Pilar Cuesta Acosta, or Ana Belén as she is more commonly known, is an actress, singer and famous Spanish woman. She was born on 27 May 1951 in Madrid
Ana Belén studied acting in Spain during her early life and began acting in theatre and movies in the mid-1960s. While working on the film Morbo by Gonzalo Suárez, she met Víctor Manuel and later married him in 1972 in Gibraltar. At this time she also started her vocation as a singer, publishing albums like ‘Tierra’ in 1973, and ‘Calle del Oso’, with songs composed by Víctor Manuel, some of them with clear political and social content.
In 1997 this famous Spanish woman released a new album ‘Mírame’ which consisted of her own songs and duets and which went on to become the best selling album of her solo career.
Famous Spanish Women: Actresses
Penélope Cruz Sánchez (born April 28, 1974), is a Golden Globe- and Academy Award-nominated Spanish actress and one of the most famous Spanish women on the planet. Initially a dancer, she rapidly moved into Spanish television and since then she has appeared in several films in Spanish, English, French, Italian and Portuguese languages.
Cruz first became famous when she appeared in the video clip La fuerza del destino for the Spanish synthpop group Mecano. Cruz’s first main films were Jamón, jamón and Belle Époque, a film which won an Academy Award for Foreign Language Film. In 1997, she starred as Sofía Pangia, alongside Eduardo Noriega in Abre los ojos, directed by Alejandro Amenábar, and in 2000 she starred with American actor Matt Damon in All the Pretty Horses. In late 2001, she appeared in the film Vanilla Sky, the Hollywood remake of Abre los ojos. She played the same role, “Beaky-nose” in both films. Cruz co-starred with her best friend, Salma Hayek in the 2006 film, Bandidas.
Famous Spanish Women: Queens
Isabella I (April 22, 1451 – November 26, 1504) was Queen of Castile and Leon. She and her husband, Ferdinand II of Aragon, laid the basis for the political union of Spain under their grandson, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. In Germanic countries, this famous Spanish woman is usually known by the Italian form of her name, ‘Isabella’. Isabella and Ferdinand deported Jewish people from Spain and made the Inquisition into a powerful body whose main victims were Catholics of Jewish or Moorish lineage. However, like a part of Iberians in general and most of Iberian nobility, she had some Jewish ancestry: three of her great-great-grandparents had Sephardic Jewish roots
