Lina Morgan: The Archetype of the Explosive Ingénue in Spanish Cinema of the Late Francoist Period

Abstract

Lina Morgan was the highest grossing female film star of Spain’s late Francoist period, and third overall aftertwo male comedians who embodied Spanish masculinity, Paco Martínez Soria and Alfredo Landa. This article offers an analysis of Lina Morgan’s career in light of Kathleen Rowe’s theory of the “unruly woman”. In a historical period when female comedians were relegated to secondary roles, the evolution of Morgan’s film career was mediated by the repressive demands of the regime; but at the same time, she sought to subvert those demands through the use of a hyperbolic poetics of the gesture and the body that would find its full expression precisely around the time of Franco’s death, in the fields of theatre and television.