Name	Pedro Almodovar
Height
Naionality	Spain
Date of Birth	September 25, 1949
Place of Birth	Spain
Famous for

Pedro Almodóvar Caballero was born on September 25, 1949 (or 1951)[2] in Calzada de Calatrava, Spain, a rural small town of Ciudad Real, a province of Castile-La Mancha in the administrative district of Almagro. La Mancha is the windswept region of flat lands made famous by Don Quijote. He was born as one of four children (two boys, two girls) in a large and impoverished family of peasant stock. His father, Antonio Almodóvar, who could barely read or write, worked most of his life hauling barrels of wine by mule. Almodóvar's mother, Francisca Caballero, turned her son into a part time teacher of literacy in the village and also a letter reader and transcriber for the neighbors. When Pedro was eight years old, the family sent him to study at a religious boarding school in the city of Cáceres, Extremadura, in the west of the country, with the hope that he might someday become a priest. His family eventually joined him in Cáceres, where his father opened a gas station and his mother opened a bodega where she sold her own wine.[3]

While Calzada did not have a cinema, the streets where he lived in Cáceres contained not only the school, but also a movie theater.[4] “Cinema became my real education, much more than the one I received from the priest,” he said later in an interview.[5]

Almodóvar was influenced by such directors as Luis Buñuel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alfred Hitchcock, John Waters, Ingmar Bergman, Edgar Neville, Federico Fellini, George Cukor, Luis García Berlanga and neorealist Marco Ferreri.

Against his parents' wishes, Pedro Almodóvar moved to Madrid in 1967. His goal was to be a film director, but he lacked the economic means to do it and besides, Franco had just closed the National School of Cinema so he would be completely self-taught. To support himself, Almodóvar worked a number of odd jobs, including a stint selling used items in the famous Madrid flea market El Rastro. He eventually found full-time employment with Spain's national phone company, Telefonica, where he worked for twelve years as an administrative assistant. Since he worked only until three in the afternoon, he had the rest of the day to pursue his own interests.