page_title: Catalina Bárcena
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Catalina Bárcena / Life
caption_attribution_description: Español: Catalina Bárcena.
context_page_description: Catalina Bárcena 10 December 1888 – 3 August 1978 was a leading Spanish theatre actress during the early decades of the twentieth century. With her partner, Gregorio Martínez Sierra, she worked on the creation of the pioneering Teatro de arte company at Madrid's Teatro Eslava between 1916 and 1926. She subsequently starred with several other high-profile theatre companies and also, during the 1930s, built a Hollywood career as a film actress. In parallel with her acting career she became something of a fashion icon.
context_section_description: Catalina Bárcena was born in Cienfuegos on Cuba, the child of small-scale farmers who had emigrated from Spain.   In 1898, backed by the United States of America, Cuba ceased to be a Spanish colony.   Around 1900 the family returned to their former home village of Santa María (Lebeña) in the mountains of northern Spain.
  When she was twenty she moved to Madrid where, helped by family contacts, she embarked on an acting career with the theatre company of María Guerrero, participating in a number of premiers including "El genio alegre" ("The cheerful genius" 1906) and "Amores y amoríos" (1908) by the Quintero brothers, as well as "La araña" ("The Spider" 1908) by Àngel Guimerà, "Las hijas del Cid" ("El Cid's daughters" 1908), "Doña María la Brava" (1909) and "En Flandes se ha puesto el sol" ("The sun has gone down in Flanders" 1910) - these last three by Eduardo Marquina.   She was also in the cast for the premier performance of "La fuente amarga" ("The bitter fountain" 1910) by Manuel Linares Rivas.
  Soon after that she formed her own theatre company.   More premiers followed, including "La losa de los sueños" (1911) by Jacinto Benavente and "Flor de los pazos" (1912) by Rivas.   From 1916 the scene of her major triumphs was Madrid's  Teatro Eslava where plays that she premiered included "No te ofendas, Beatriz" (1920) and "Chica del gato" (1921), both by Carlos Arniches.
  By 1916 Bárcena had teamed up with Gregorio Martínez Sierra, a playwright, publisher and stage director characterised by one source as "an even more unsuitable man".   The partnership was both professional and personal.   Eight years her senior, Martínez Sierra drew respect as a progressive playwright at a time when most of the dramatists writing for the Madrid theatre were unadventurous and conservative.   Martínez Sierra was married to the feminist writer and activist, María Lejárraga, who was understood to help her husband with his plays:  there are suggestions from some quarters that she wrote them.   Lejárraga was disinclined to agree to a divorce, and while Martínez Sierra and Bárcena cohabited openly, his wife took to describing herself, just as openly, as her husband's widow.
  Bárcena introduced more works by Martínez Sierra to the Madrid stage, along with pieces by Benito Pérez Galdós and Jacinto Benavente.   One of her lover's contributions to the Spanish stage was as a translator: Bárcena featured in premiers of important foreign plays such as Ibsen's Doll's House (1917) and Shaw's Pygmalion (1920).   The partnership with Martínez Sierra also gave rise to a succession of further premiers of plays by a younger generation of Spanish writers during the 1920s.   One was of "El maleficio de la mariposa" ("The Curse of the Butterfly"), generally identified as the first play by Federico García Lorca, in a production that used memorable costumes designed by Rafael Barradas.   As early as 1916 Bárcena and Martínez Sierra were involving themselves in the newly popular genre of pantomime, blending the traditions of musical theatre and spoken stage works.
  In 1922 she gave birth to her daughter, Katia.   The father of the infant was Martínez Sierra.   It was partly to get away from the scandal generated by the illegitimate birth that in 1926 Catalina Bárcena embarked on a tour of South America.   Costume and clothes were important to her, and she was accompanied by her wardrobe mistress, Antonia García.   She was presumably well received by theatre audiences, since the South American tour lasted three years.   By the time she returned to Madrid, commercial theatre was in crisis.   The international cinema industry was undergoing traumas of its own, reflecting the switch from silent movies to "talkies".   Bárcena had always sworn that she would have nothing to do with cinema, but in California the major studios were desperately confronting the reality that many of the top stars of the silent screen lacked the voice projection and other vocal talents appropriate for the new technologies.   In 1927 she signed up with Fox, starring in a succession of Spanish lang
caption: Catalina Bárcena Caricature by Tovar1918
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