BRITISH-BORN chairwoman of the Spanish Film Academy Yvonne Blake will be forced to miss this year's Goya Awards as she is still recovering from a stroke.
For Ms Blake, 77, it will have been exactly a month since she was rushed to Madrid's Ramón y Cajal Hospital, where she spent a week in intensive care.
Her convalescence and rehabilitation mean she will not be fit enough to attend Spain's answer to the Oscars, due to be held on Saturday, February 3 and now in its 32nd year.
The Goyas, in a fortnight's time, will be presented by famous national stand-up comedians Joaquín Reyes and Ernesto Sevilla, and favourits to win Best Film Award are Aitor Arregi and Jon Garaño's Handia and Isabel Coixet's La Librería ('The Bookshop').
Yvonne Blake, from Manchester but with Spanish citizenship since the 1970s when she met her future husband, director's assistant Gil Carretero, is a famed costume designer who has worked with huge names such as Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Sean Connery, Robert de Niro and Marlon Brando.
She won a Best Costume Oscar for Franklin J Shaffner's Nicholas and Alexandra, a British epic about the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, and his wife, the Tsarina Alexandra, set between 1904 and 1918 and filmed in Spain and what was then Yugoslavia.
Ms Blake has been on the other side of the set during the Goya Awards – four times in fact, for Mary McGuckian's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, for Aranda's Carmen, José Luis García's Canción de Cuna ('Cradle Song'), and Gonzalo Suárez's Rowing with the Wind, about poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his daughter Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.
This 1988 production was where Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley met and began dating.
