Montserrat Julió (Mataró, 1929-2017) was an actress, playwright and writer.

At the age of ten she went into exile with her parents, first to France and then to Chile, on board the SS Winnipeg, the vessel which Pablo Neruda, then special Consul for Immigration in Paris, managed to organise to take Spanish republican refugees to Chile. She was educated in Chile and embarked on her career as an actress until she returned to Barcelona in 1957. Here, she worked as an actress and devoted her professional life to theatre as an actress and director with the Agrupació Dramàtica de Barcelona (Barcelona Theatre Group). She then moved to Madrid, where she has spent the greater part of her working life, and where she lives to the present day. Among the plays she has directed are George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (in 1981), and a version of Joan Oliver’s play El roig i el blau (Red and Blue, 1985) and also his Allò que tal vegada s’esdevingué (What Might Have Happened, 1987), and Woody Allen’s Com acabar d’una vegada i per sempre amb la maleïda cultura (Getting Even, 1987), which was performed in the Teatre Comtal of Barcelona.

Montserrat Julió published the novel Memòries d'un futur bàrbar (Memories of a Barbarous Future), which appeared 1975 and was reprinted in 2003, and her memoirs Vida endins. Crònica d’un exili a Xile (Inner Life: Chronicle of Exile in Chile, 2003).

Montserrat Julió was an honorary member of Associació d’Escriptors en Llengua Catalana (Association of Catalan Language Writers).



Web page: Toni Terrades for AELC.
First photograph from the Lletres i Memòria (Letters and Memory) archive. Photographs from the autobiography © Vida endins. Crònica d'un exili a Xile. Barcelona, Viena, 2003.
Translated by Julie Wark.