General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20269 min read

Fortunata y Jacinta

Fortunata y Jacinta is a novel by the Spanish writer Benito Pérez Galdós, first published in 1887 in four tomes and widely regarded as one of the summits of his work.¹^•² Its full title in early editions, Fortunata y Jacinta: Dos historias de casadas (Fortunata and Jacinta: Two Stories of Married Women), announces its double focus: two women of different social classes in Madrid, both bound to the same man, Juanito Santa Cruz.³ Set in the Madrid of the second half of the nineteenth century, it has been adapted for the stage, for cinema, and most famously for a 1980 television series directed by Mario Camus.⁴

Key fact	Detail
Author	Benito Pérez Galdós (born Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 10 May 1843; died Madrid, 4 January 1920)¹
Publication	1887, in four tomes, at the height of the author's literary maturity¹^•⁵
Setting	Madrid, over seven years, from December 1869 to 1876⁵
Central plot	Juanito Santa Cruz, son of a wealthy bourgeois family, marries his cousin Jacinta but keeps up a relationship with Fortunata, a woman of a humble family⁴
Film adaptation	Directed by Angelino Fons, premiered 6 April 1970, 112 minutes, with Emma Penella as Fortunata⁶
Stage adaptation	Ricardo López Aranda's version premiered 24 September 1969 at the Teatro Lara, Madrid, with the company of Nati Mistral⁷
Television series	Ten chapters directed by Mario Camus for TVE, first broadcast 7 May 1980, budget 160 million pesetas⁵
International reach	The series has been sold to more than 30 countries since its 1980 premiere⁸

Spoilers

Plot: The novel

Plot. Juan, the only son of the aristocratic Santa Cruz family, begins a romance with Fortunata, a young woman from a humble family. His mother decides to marry him to her niece Jacinta.⁴ Jacinta, curious about her husband's past, learns that he promised Fortunata marriage and abandoned her with a child; believing a boy to be the child of Fortunata and Juan, she adopts him.⁵ Fortunata later marries the sickly pharmacy student Maximiliano Rubín, who tries to rescue her from what the novel presents as a degraded life, but she cannot stop loving Juan, with whom she resumes relations and has another son.⁵ The two women meet, first as rivals and then with Fortunata wanting to resemble Jacinta, and the story closes with Fortunata's death after a fight with her friend Aurora and Maximiliano's confinement in an asylum.⁵

The novel

Galdós was forty-four years old when the Madrid publishing house La Guirnalda brought out the first edition.¹ The book belongs to his cycle of Novelas españolas contemporáneas (Contemporary Spanish Novels), and it took him almost three years to complete.² The action unfolds in Madrid between December 1869 and 1876, the period of the early Restoration, and the city itself functions as a collective character: one account of the novel describes it as a "total novel" in which the universe of Madrid in those years is told in full, every character, emotion, and relationship among its inhabitants.⁵^•¹

Critical standing. The scholar Sally Faulkner of the University of Exeter, writing on Spanish literary adaptation, places Fortunata y Jacinta alongside Leopoldo Alas's La Regenta as the two novels considered Spain's finest of the nineteenth century.⁹ The critic of the nineteenth century Menéndez Pelayo characterized it as a novel that aspires to present life with maximum diaphanousness, in its interior dimension and in its vast external panorama, achieving a high degree of the illusion of reality and a scrupulous analysis of the historical process.¹⁰ Galdós himself located the book in what one commentator calls "true naturalism," finding its aesthetic material in the observation of contemporary life and of the human fauna of the city.¹

The 1969 stage adaptation

The playwright Ricardo López Aranda (20 December 1934 to 25 November 1996) adapted the novel for the theater; the Centro de Documentación Teatral holds his manuscripts and successive drafts of the version.¹¹ The play premiered on 24 September 1969 at the Teatro Lara in Madrid, performed by the Compañía de Nati Mistral and directed by Alberto González Vergel, with Nati Mistral as Fortunata, Lola Herrera as Jacinta, and Sancho Gracia and Manuel Tejada alternating as Juan.⁷

The adaptation compresses the novel into 16 characters, 11 female and 5 male, ideally played by 16 actors.¹² It places the action in oppressive, closed spaces that accentuate the characters' unhappiness, and some dialogues are written with such cruelty that the situation passes from drama into what one description calls torture.¹² The play was revived twenty-four years later at the Festival Internacional de Santander on 4 August 1993, and that production opened at the Teatro Español in Madrid on 17 September 1994, directed by Juan Carlos Pérez de la Fuente, with Nuria Gallardo as Fortunata and Maru Valdivieso as Jacinta.¹²^•⁷

The 1970 film

A cinema version directed by Angelino Fons was produced by Emiliano Piedra P.C. in Spain and Mercury Produzzione Films in Italy, with cinematography by Aldo Tonti and a screenplay adapted by Alfredo Mañas, López Aranda, and Fons.⁶ It premiered on 6 April 1970, runs 112 minutes, and stars Emma Penella as Fortunata, Liana Orfei as Jacinta, Máximo Valverde as Juan Santacruz, Bruno Corazzari as Maximiliano Rubín, and Julia Gutiérrez Caba as Guillermina la Santa.⁶^•¹³ The project was set in motion by the producer Emiliano Piedra for the showcase of his wife, Emma Penella.¹⁴ Faulkner notes that, remarkably for a novel of this standing, this 1970 film remains its only film adaptation, a fate she contrasts with the repeated filming of Dickens and Austen in the Anglo-American tradition.⁹

The 1980 television series

The best-known adaptation is the series produced by Televisión Española and directed by Mario Camus, an experienced director and screenwriter already known for Curro Jiménez.⁸ TVE's board approved the project on 18 November 1976, and the contracts were signed on 2 May 1977; executives at Prado del Rey took more than three years to commit to it.⁵ The first of ten chapters was broadcast on 7 May 1980, with a budget of 160 million pesetas, which one contemporary report called perhaps the most important production in TVE's history.⁵ Camus conceived it not as television but as "a film of nine hours," and French co-financing through Telefrance and Televentia brought the French actor François-Eric Gendron into the role of Juanito Santa Cruz.⁸

Production scale. The series was shot from 14 May to 5 December 1979 in natural locations in Madrid, Aranjuez, Boadilla del Monte, Villaviciosa de Odón, Toledo, Comillas, Burgos, and Sevilla.⁵ To hold down costs, 20,000 square meters of sets were built on an esplanade beside the Prado del Rey studios, reproducing the plaza de Pontejos, the calles de Toledo and Cava de San Miguel, and the neighborhoods of Lavapiés, San Antón, Las Vistillas, and Chamberí.⁵^•⁸ The model-maker Emilio Ruiz, described as one of the best in the history of cinema, completed the upper floors of the set buildings by placing a miniature between the camera and the built lower floors, creating the illusion of a whole edifice.⁸ The cast comprised more than thirty principal actors, a hundred supporting players, and 3,500 extras; Ana Belén took the largest role of her career to that point as Fortunata, Maribel Martín played Jacinta, Mario Pardo played Maximiliano, and the supporting cast included Fernando Fernán Gómez as Evaristo Feijoo, Paco Rabal as José Izquierdo, Charo López as Mauricia, Mary Carrillo as Bárbara Arnaiz, and Manuel Alexandre as Estupiñá.⁵^•⁸ Antón García Abril composed the original music.⁵

Fidelity to the text. The screenwriters, López Aranda together with Camus, chose to set aside the vast world of the early Restoration that Galdós describes, since recreating it in a normal-length film was unworkable, and to concentrate on the central story of the loves of Fortunata and Juanito Santa Cruz with Jacinta in the background.¹⁵ The nearly ten hours of footage, however, allowed the novel to be recreated without discarding fundamental elements and with an argumental thread similar to the novelistic one.¹⁵ Fidelity to the original text was supported by Pedro Ortiz Armengol, a diplomat posted in London and an expert on Galdós, who advised Camus on the adaptation.⁵

Reception and afterlife. The series was sold to a large part of the European and Latin American television markets before its Spanish premiere and has since been sold to more than 30 countries.⁵^•⁸ It has been rebroadcast on Spanish and other European and American channels, released on VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray, and made available on RTVE's streaming service, and it is regarded as a model for television versions of nineteenth-century novels.¹⁶ Its success opened the way to other literary adaptations on Spanish television, such as Los gozos y las sombras (1982) and Los pazos de Ulloa (1986).¹⁵ A 2024 exhibition on seven decades of Spanish television, Las series de nuestra vida, at the SGAE's Palacio de Longoria in Madrid, included it among the literary classics adapted for the screen that marked the audience of their era and popularized great works of Spanish literature.¹⁷

Galdós on screen

Galdós is the Spanish author whose novels have been adapted most frequently in the history of Spanish cinema and television, although of his seventy-seven texts relatively few have been adapted; Spanish screen culture has not shared the Anglo-American fixation on the nineteenth-century novel, and in the post-Franco period filmmakers turned more often to material from or about the civil war and postwar periods.⁹ The 1980 Fortunata y Jacinta stands as the emblematic case of that adaptation tradition: Telemadrid's survey of Galdós on screen describes the intensity of Ana Belén's performance and the force of the story as fixing this version as one of the most emblematic adaptations of the author.¹⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Adaptations of literature, stage, and other media › Adaptations of non-English-language literature

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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