Viggo Mortensen up for lifetime achievement award at San Sebastián Film Festival

The festival in the seafront city – known as 'Donostia' in the Basque language, and which is the capital of the province of Guipúzcoa – is due to take place between September 18 and 26, meaning that unless a further outbreak of Covid-19 occurs nationwide or in the area, it is far enough ahead that it should not be affected.

Assuming it goes ahead as planned, Mortensen's début as a director, Falling, in which the prolific actor also plays the lead part, will be shown, having also been chosen for the programming at the Sundance Festival and Cannes 2020.

Mortensen, 61, plays John Petersen, who lives with his boyfriend Eric (Terry Chen) and their adopted daughter Mónica in Los Angeles, and veteran actor Lance Henriksen plays Willis, the father in the present day and Sverrir Guðnason in the past – a traditional, conservative farmer looking for the perfect place to retire to - and their very different worlds collide to produce family dramas when Willis travels to California to stay with John, old wounds reopening and new ones being inflicted.

The half-Danish actor – his dad, from the northern European country, married an American-Canadian woman – is no stranger to Spain or even to playing Spanish-speaking rôles.

He lived and went to school in various parts of Argentina, from birth to age 11 when he moved to New York as a result of his parents' divorce, but has always been a fan of the Argentine football team Club Atlético San Lorenzo de Almagro FC – in fact, as its strip is blue and burgundy, wearing it in Spain's capital whilst filming in 2006 turned out to be a bad move since he was beaten up by Real Madrid radicals who mistook him for a Barça supporter.

Mortensen's fluent Spanish gave him a part in the film production of novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte's Golden-Age swashbuckling series, Capitán Alatriste – but the star had to spend time in villages in the Curueño Valley in the province of León so his Río Plata accent sounded more 'Spanish', even though the actual shooting took place in Cádiz.

A published poet, photographer and painter and professional jazz musician, Mortensen – who supported Catalunya's right to a vote on independence two years ago by joining the society Òmnium Cultural – is probably best known globally for his fleshing out Aragorn in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

He also starred in a screen adaptation of Jack Kérouac's novel On the Road, in Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, and The Perfect Crime among other popular productions, and has worked alongside famous names such as Harrison Ford, Sean Penn and Keira Knightley.

Mortensen, as well as Spanish and English, is also fluent in his father's native Danish, since he spent every summer as a child with his family on the farm in Denmark where his dad grew up.

The photograph shows the actor in 2016 at Cannes Film Festival (Wikimedia Commons).