Pepa Arenós

Josefa Arenós i Ardiaca, known as Pepa, was born in 1948 in Barcelona and grew up in the Gràcia district, where she was born on Carrer del Progrés. She studied at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona, graduating in dramatic art, and started acting as a young woman with the independent theatre group El Camaleó, a company associated with the brothers Jordi and Ramon Teixidor, the writer Francesc Candel and the actor Antoni Lucchetti.

Arenós belonged to the generation of performers who drove Catalan independent theatre in the late 1960s and 1970s. Her professional career took off with Marat-Sade, directed by Adolfo Marsillach in 1969. With Ricard Salvat and the Companyia Adrià Gual she premiered Primera història d'Esther, Aigües encantades, Ronda de mort a Sinera and Les Bacants, and she appeared in Dones i Catalunya (1983), a feminist account of Catalan history. She also worked with Jaume Melendres, Feliu Formosa and Esteve Polls, played in Copi's Una visita inoportuna at the Teatre Poliorama in 1989 under Jorge Lavelli, alongside Enric Majó and Francesc Orella, and was in the cast of Stalin in 2007.

On screen she started in televised theatre for TVE in Catalonia in the 1970s and became a familiar face on TV3 through Tot un senyor (1989), La Granja (1990 to 1992), Estació d'enllaç (1995 to 1997), Jet Lag, Setze dobles and Ventdelplà (2005 to 2008), in which she played Rosalia. Her films included Las largas vacaciones del 36 (1976), La punyalada (1990), El embrujo de Shanghai (2002) and Inconscientes (2004).

She had a long career in dubbing, particularly in animation, voicing Baba the fortune teller in the Catalan version of Dragon Ball. On radio she presented the ecology programme Línia Verda on Ràdio 4 in 1986 and took part in many radio dramas, especially on Catalunya Ràdio. In 2020 she joined other leading Catalan actors in readings of stories by Pere Calders for the Ateneu Barcelonès.

Arenós combined her acting with political activism throughout her life. During the dictatorship she was a member of Bandera Roja and the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya, and linked her theatre work to the resistance movement. On 11 September 1976 she presented the Diada rally in the Plaça de Catalunya of Sant Boi de Llobregat, where she warned the crowd about a police helicopter flying over the square and denounced the surveillance of the demonstration. She recalled the day on the 3Cat programme Tot es mou in 2026, the fiftieth anniversary.

During the Catalan independence process she took part in mobilisations and cultural initiatives in support of self determination and of the jailed independence leaders, and served as vice president of teatRe amb R de República. In her final years she joined hundreds of rallies calling for the former police station at Via Laietana 43 in Barcelona to become a memorial site.

Pepa Arenós died on Sunday 25 October 2026, aged 78. Her fellow campaigners in the Via Laietana 43 platform confirmed her death to the newspaper Ara, and it was reported that evening by Ara, VilaWeb, 3CatInfo and El País. No cause of death was made public, and funeral arrangements had not been reported.

Arenós is remembered both as a versatile performer whose voice and face were part of Catalan television and theatre for decades, and as one of the cultural figures most closely tied to the democratic and national movements in Catalonia. Her presentation of the 1976 Sant Boi Diada, preserved in photographs by Pilar Aymerich in the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya, remains part of the history of the Spanish transition.