Pintura, Película, Libro y Canción Quiz

Answer: película (movie)

José Antonio Domínguez Bandera, to use his full name, was born in 1960 in Málaga, and made his film debut in the 1982 comedy 'Labyrinth of Passion', directed by Pedro Almodóvar, with whom he made a number of subsequent films. His Hollywood career began in 1991, at which time he spoke little English, and had to learn his parts phonetically. According to a 2011 interview in the magazine 'GQ', he still has trouble pronouncing certain words properly, most notably the word "animals", which he has changed when it appears in a script.

As well as continuing to work with Almodóvar, he has been in a wide range of films, including 'Philadelphia' (as Tom Hanks's lover), 'Evita' (as Ché), 'The Mask of Zorro' (as the man being trained as the new Zorro) and 'Shrek 2' (as the voice of Puss in Boots).

Answer: película (movie)

Luis Buñuel Portolés (1900-1983) was born in a small Aragonese town called Calanda, but the family moved to Zaragoza when he was only a few months old. At the age of 17 he attended the University of Madrid, where he lived in the Residencia de Estudiantes and formed close friendships with other young avant-garde artists, including Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dali.

He collaborated with the latter to produce his classic silent short film 'Un Chien Andalou' ('An Andalusian Dog'), in 1929. After its premier, Dali and Buñuel were officially recognised as members of the Surrealist movement.

The Spanish Civil War saw him working abroad, in Switzerland and Paris, before travelling to the United States to provide technical advice for people producing films there about the war - which ended almost exactly when he arrived. Nevertheless, he stayed there until the end of World War II, when he moved to Mexico, where the film industry was booming.

He lived there for the rest of his life, while travelling to other countries to work on a number of films.

His last film, 'Cet obscur objet du désir' ('That Obscure Object of Desire') was released in 1977. Buñuel is considered by most critics to have been one of the most influential film makers of the 20th century.

Answer: canción (song)

Josep Maria Carreras i Coll, better known as José Carreras, was born in Barcelona in 1946, and made his operatic debut in 1957, proceeding to a career as one of the most respected tenors of his era, specialising in the works of Verdi and Puccini. His fame extended beyond the world of opera fans when he participated with Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti in the Three Tenors concerts.

They first performed together in 1990, as part of the FIFA World Cup Final. The recording of this concert became a best-seller, and the trio performed again at World Cup Finals in 1994, 1998 and 2002, as well as many other concerts in arenas around the world, with their final appearance in 2003.

These concerts, and much of Carraras's later solo performance work, included some operatic pieces, mixed in with material from Broadway shows, traditional folk songs, and pop/easy listening music.

Answer: libro (book)

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra is presumed (based on baptismal records of the church in Alcalá de Henares) to have been born in 1547; he died, after an adventurous life, in 1616. He is probably the first person you thought of when considering that there was going to be a Spanish author in this quiz, as his 'Don Quixote' is so widely known.

Not only is it considered one of the first modern European novels, which has been translated into around 150 languages and dialects, but it also provided the inspiration for the Broadway musical (and later musical movie) 'The Man of La Mancha'.

As a young man, he was forced to leave Spain for undetermined reasons, and spent some years in Italy before enlisting in a regiment of the Spanish Marines based in Naples, with whom he participated in the 1571 Battle of Lepanto.

In 1575 his ship was captured by pirates, and he spent five years as a slave in northern Africa before being ransomed and returning to Madrid. There he pursued a variety of jobs, and served at least a few prison sentences caused by financial problems.

It was during one of these periods of imprisonment that he started writing 'Don Quixote'.

Answer: película (movie)

Penélope Cruz Sánchez, born in 1974, is an actress whose first film was the 1992 Spanish comedy/drama 'Jamón Jamón' ('Ham Ham'). In 1994, with a number of successful Spanish and Italian films under her belt, she moved to New York to work on improving her English, with an eye on Hollywood.

Her subsequent films have been split between Europe and the United States. Her performance as Maria Elena in the 2008 Woody Allen film 'Vicky Cristina Bercelona' earned her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the first Spanish actress to win an Oscar.

She was also the first to be awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in 2011.

Answer: libro (book)

Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was born in the town of Fuente Vaqueros (near Granada) in 1898, and died in 1936, executed by Nationalists near the start of the Spanish Civil War. Although he achieved fame as a poet and playwright, as a youth, he was more interested in music than literature, and his early writing reflects that, with a number of them structured to reflect musical forms, such as 'Nocturne' and 'Sonata'.

In 1919, while a student at Madrid University, he moved into the Residencia de Estudiantes, where he became friends with a number of members of the avant-garde, including Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel.

His first play, 'The Butterfly's Evil Spell', first staged in 1920, was about the love of a cockroach for a butterfly.

More successful was his 1928 book of poetry 'Romancero Gitano' ('Gypsy Ballads'), which was modelled on traditional Andalusian songs and poems. The success of this book led to some estrangement from Dali, who had been an intimate friend. García Lorca subsequently felt that the film 'Un Chien Andalou' ('An Andalusian Dog') written and produced by Dali and Buñuel, was a personal attack on him.

Answer: pintura (painting)

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born in 1746 in the Aragonese village of Fuendetodos, and died in the French city of Bordeaux, where he lived for the last four years of his life, in 1828. Generally considered the most important Spanish painter of his time, he is sometimes considered one of the last of the Old Masters (a term applied to the best European artists before 1800), but his work also showed signs of the modern schools that developed during the 19th century.

He is perhaps best known for the many portraits he painted while being official court painter to the Spanish Crown, a position to which he was appointed in 1786.

In his later years, his subject matter became much darker and more politically orientated. This is especially true of the set of 14 murals called the Black Paintings, executed on the walls of his house between 1819 and 1823, at a time when he was deaf (from a mystery illness that led him to fear the possibility of encroaching insanity) and increasingly aware of the nearness of death as he aged.

Answer: pintura (painting)

Although he was born in Crete (then part of the Republic of Venice) in 1541, Doménikos Theotokópoulos is best known, by his nickname of 'El Greco', as one of the leading painters and sculptors of the Spanish Renaissance. After training in Crete (where he qualified as a Master by the age of 22), he spent time studying in Rome before moving to Toledo in 1577, where he remained until his death in 1614.

His first Spanish commission was a set of nine paintings for Toledo's church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo.

He hoped to work his way to the royal court, but a few small commissions fell flat, and that hope was never fulfilled. In 1586 he received a commission to paint 'The Burial of the Count of Orgaz', an illustration of a local miracle story, for the church of Santo Tomé.

His incorporation of portraits of a number of leading Toledo citizens as the nobility attending on the funeral made it immediately popular with the locals. It is still seen as the painting that marked his maturity as an artist, and one of his finest works.

Answer: canción (song)

Born in 1943 in Madrid, Julio José Iglesias de la Cueva started off studying law and playing football (that's European football, called soccer in North America) as goalkeeper for Real Madrid Castilla. His football career was cut short by an automobile accident that left his unable to walk for two years.

In 1968 he won a prestigious Spanish songwriting contest with the title song from a movie about his life to that point, 'La vida sigue igual' ('Life Goes on the Same'). This led to a recording contract, and his performance of 'Gwendolyne' in the 1970 Eurovision Song Contest brought the charismatic singer international recognition.

He has recorded in over ten different languages, and sold over 250 million records, both as a solo artist and in duets with such luminaries as Willie Nelson ('To All the Girls I've Loved Before'), Diana Ross ('All of You') and Stevie Wonder ('My Love').

Answer: pintura (painting)

Baptized Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso in the city of Málaga in 1881, Pablo Picasso was a multi-talented artist who worked in a range of media, including painting, sculpture, collage, printmaking, ceramics, poetry, as well as writing and designing sets for the stage.

However, for the purposes of this quiz, we will consider him a painter. Perhaps his best-known painting is 'Guernica', inspired by the bombing of that Basque town on behalf of the Nationalist forces by German and Italian planes. Picasso's work is often described as belonging to a series of periods, as his style kept changing.

The 1890s are often called his Juvenile Period, as he was still experimenting, and developing a sense of himself as an artist.

A visit to Paris in 1900 was followed by the start of his Blue Period (1901-10904) in which the paintings were sombre in tone and in color. There followed the much lighter Rose Period (1904-1906); the African Period (1907-1909), during which he started to move towards cubism; the Analytic Cubist Period (1909-1912), which involved working with Georges Braque to develop the concept of cubism; the Crystal Period, also called the Synthetic Cubist Period (1912-1919), which marked the culmination of cubism as a movement; the NeoClassical Period immediately following the end of World War I; and the Surrealist Period of the 1920s.

His later works (spanning the years until his death in 1973) often incorporated elements from a variety of his earlier foci.