Fernán Gómez was regarded as one of Spain's most beloved and respected entertainers, winning two Silver Bears for Best Actor at the Berlin International Film Festival for The Anchorite and Stico.

He directed over 25 films, among them El extraño viaje (1964), and Life Goes On (1965), both great classics of the Spanish cinema that were very limited distribution due to Franco's censorship[2][3] and made him a "cursed" filmmaker in his country.

[7] After some performing school works, he decided to study Philosophy and Letters in Madrid, which he subsequently abandoned when the Spanish Civil War began, but his true vocation led him to the theater.

During his career he occasionally play supporting roles in such foreign films as Voice of Silence (1953), The Bachelor (1955), starring Alberto Sordi, The Pyjama Girl Case (1977), with Ray Milland, and Marcellino pane e vino [it] (1991).

The film pioneered in Spain in breaking the fourth wall and telling the plot in the form of flashbacks[12] and its success led him to made a sequel, La vida alrededor (1959).

[16] The latter was followed by Life Goes On (1965), one of the most terrifying and merciless moral portraits of Francoist Spain,[17][18] He was very much in demand as an actor in the 1970s and 1980s, expanding his range in many films of the new Spanish cinema: starring alongside Geraldine Chaplin in Carlos Saura's Ana and the Wolves (1973) and its sequel Mama Turns 100 (1979), The Love of Captain Brando (1974), Pim, pam, pum... ¡fuego!

[29] The 1990s was a less active acting period for him, but he enjoyed something of a revival, featuring in five major projects: the historical co-production The Dumbfounded King (1991), the two winners of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film Belle Époque (1992) and All About My Mother (1999),[30] The Grandfather (1998), which he won a second Goya Award for Best Actor in 1999 for his praised role as Don Rodrigo, Count of Albrit, an old Spanish aristocrat,[31][32] and the hit Butterfly's Tongue (1999), playing Don Gregorio, a republican schoolteacher.

The most successful was the play Las bicicletas son para el verano (Bicycles Are for the Summer) in 1977,[39] showing the sufferings of a family and their neighbours in besieged Madrid during the Civil War.

As theater director he staged plays such as Dear Liar (1962), by Bernard Shaw; The Kreutzer Sonata (1963), by Leo Tolstoy; Thought (1963), by Leonid Andreyev; and Juan José Alonso Millán's [es] comedies Gravemente peligrosa (1962), Mayores con reparos (1965) and La vil seducción (1967).

[45] On January 30, 2000, he entered the Royal Spanish Academy for his artistic accomplishments, where he took possession of Seat B with the speech titled "Aventura de la palabra en el siglo xx".

[53] In 2017, in commemoration of the 10 years since his death, the exhibition Fernando Fernán Gómez “El Ilustrado” was inaugurated by the graphic artists of the Association of Cadiz Illustrators at the University of Cádiz.

[54] On 3 March 2022, the Instituto Cervantes received the “in memoriam” legacy of Fernán Gómez: his 1938 CNT card and the pen that was given to him when he entered the Royal Spanish Academy in 2000.

[55][56] In 2023, the Spanish Government acquired the archive of Fernando Fernán Gómez and his wife Emma Cohen, which is made up of 250 boxes and other objects that are already kept in the facilities of the Filmoteca Española, entity dependent on the Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts (ICAA).