Antonio Banderas Biography

Spanish actor Antonio Banderas is a stylish leading man of stage and screen who won an Oscar nomination in 2020 for his role as an aging film director in the drama Pain and Glory.

Before making his Hollywood debut in in 1992’s The Mambo Kings, Antonio Banderas appeared in dozens of Spanish movies, including director Pedro Almodovar’s Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990). He received critical praise in the U.S. for Philadelphia (1993, starring Tom Hanks), then proved himself an able action hero in the Robert Rodriguez film Desperado (1995). The Mask of Zorro (1998, with Catherine Zeta-Jones) made him a box office star.

Long one of the busiest actors in filmdom, Banderas has starred in movies including Spy Kids and its sequels (2001-03), Shrek (2002)  Shrek 2 (2004) and Shrek the Third (2007) as the voice of Puss in Boots, The Legend of Zorro (2005), Take the Lead (2006), The Other Man (2008), The Code (2009, with Morgan Freeman), The Expendables 3 (2014, with Sylvester Stallone) and the TV miniseries Genius: Picasso (2018, with Banderas as artist Pablo Picasso).

Antonio Banderas directed his then-wife, actress Melanie Griffith, in the 1999 movie Crazy in Alabama, and in 2006 he took another turn behind the camera for Summer Rain. He received his first Oscar nomination for the 2019 film Pain and Glory, in which he played a thinly-disguised version of his old friend and director Pedro Almodovar.