In 1997, Almodóvar received the French Legion of Honour, followed by the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts by the Spanish Ministry of Culture in 1999.
He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and received an honorary doctoral degree in 2009 from Harvard University in addition to an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Oxford in 2016 for his contribution to the arts. Almodóvar also received the honorary European Film Academy Achievement in World Cinema Award in 2013, served as the President of the Jury for the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, and was awarded the Honorary Golden Lion at the 76th Venice International Film Festival in 2019. Pedro Almodóvar Caballero was born on 25 September 1949 in Calzada de Calatrava, a small rural town of Ciudad Real, a province of Castile-La Mancha in Spain. He has two older sisters, Antonia and María Jesús, and one brother Agustín. His father, Antonio Almodóvar, was a winemaker, and his mother, Francisca Caballero, who died in 1999, was a letter reader and transcriber for illiterate neighbours. When Almodóvar was eight years old, the family sent him to study at a religious boarding school in the city of Cáceres, Extremadura, in western Spain, with the hope that he might someday become a priest.
