Adriana Ugarte

Adriana Sofía Ugarte Pardal was born on 17 January 1985 in Madrid, Spain, into a cultured family; her mother Yolanda Pardal is a lawyer and writer, and she is the grand‑niece of Eduardo Ugarte, a noted collaborator of Luis Buñuel and husband of a daughter of playwright Carlos Arniches. She attended the prestigious Colegio del Pilar and later began a licentiate degree in Philosophy and Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid, a study she temporarily paused before completing it through the National University of Distance Education (UNED). At the age of sixteen she entered the world of cinema with the short film Mala Espina (2001), directed by Belén Macías, a performance that earned her the Best Female Performance award at the Alcalá de Henares Festival of Short Films. Following this early accolade, she accumulated guest appearances in Spanish television staples such as Policías, en el corazón de la calle, Hospital Central and El comisario, and received a Goya nomination for Best New Actress for her role as Consuelo in Doghead (2006). Her breakthrough came with the lead role of Victoria Márquez de la Vega in the period series La Señora (2008‑2010), which propelled her to national popularity and opened doors to further film work, including The Hanged Man (2008) and Paper Castles (2009). In 2013 she captivated audiences as Sira in the adaptation of María Dueñas’s novel El tiempo entre costuras, a series that achieved record viewership for Antena 3. More recently she reunited with acclaimed director Pedro Almodóvar in Julieta (2016), confirming her status as one of Spain’s most versatile and respected actresses, active continuously from 2001 to the present.