Calle de Pilar Millán Astray

The Calle de Pilar Millán Astray recalls one of the most popular playwrights of interwar Madrid, and a woman whose life breaks free of any predictable script. She was born in A Coruña in 1879. Widowed in 1919 with three children to raise, that same year she won the Blanco y Negro prize with a short novel that opened the door to the theatre. Jacinto Benavente pushed her to write for the stage, and in 1925 La tonta del bote shattered box-office records in popular Madrid theatre with 310 performances in a row. That year she had plays running at four theatres in the city at once. She signed close to fifty titles. Her biography holds an unexpected chapter: during the First World War she worked as a German intelligence agent in Barcelona. She backed the 1936 uprising and paid for it with 32 months in Republican prisons, an experience she poured into the book Cautivas (1940). She died in Madrid in 1949.