Sandy’s Spanish Voice and Dr. House’s Get Spain’s Premios Actúa Today. One Once Thought Dubbing Was Her Curse

Spain’s performers gather in Madrid on Monday to applaud two people most of the country knows only by ear. Marta Angelat, the Spanish voice of Emma Thompson and of Sandy in Grease, and Luis Porcar, the Spanish voice of Dr. Gregory House, receive the Premio Actúa for voice actors at the Nuevo Teatro Alcalá in Madrid. One of them once thought dubbing was her curse. The other spent his career trying not to be noticed.

The Premios Actúa are given by the AISGE Foundation, the cultural arm of AISGE, the Spanish society that manages the rights of actors, dancers and voice actors. This is the 18th edition. Since 2009 the awards have honoured whole careers, and as the foundation puts it, “professional and human integrity,” in five categories: actresses, actors, dancers, voice actors and a New Generation prize for younger performers.

That puts dubbing on the same stage, on the same night, as Spain’s best-known screen and theatre names. For the people who do the work, that’s a statement in itself.

The Premio Actúa statuette. Image: AISGE

Every winner of the 2026 Premios Actúa

AISGE released the names one category at a time over September and October. Here’s the full list, with each winner’s home town and year of birth where AISGE gave them.

• Voice actors: Marta Angelat (Barcelona, 1953) and Luis Porcar (Valencia, 1943).
• Actresses: Concha Cuetos (Madrid, 1944) and Ana Marzoa (Buenos Aires, 1949).
• Actors: Tito Valverde (Ávila, 1951) and Juan Gea (Valencia, 1953).
• Dance: Antonio Alonso (Madrid, 1951) and Zenaida Yanowsky.
• New Generation: Lucía Caraballo (Madrid, 1999) and Miguel Bernardeau (Valencia, 1996).
• Premio HazTuAcción: Fundación CRIS contra el Cáncer, a cancer research charity.
• Premio Pilar Bardem: Fernando Méndez-Leite, president of Spain’s Film Academy.

Congratulations to all of them. For readers of this site, though, the voice category is the one to watch.

Marta Angelat: Sandy, Emma Thompson, and a love-hate affair

Angelat was born on the first day of 1953 into a house full of microphones. Her father, Josep Maria Angelat, was an actor and dubbing artist, and her mother, Florència Grau, wrote scripts for radio. She was in front of a film camera at seven, in Rafael Gil’s Siega verde.

Marta Angelat. Image: AISGE, photo by Marc Llibre

In dubbing she started on children’s voices and grew into adult leads. AISGE lists Emma Thompson, Anjelica Huston, Geena Davis, Cher, Barbara Hershey and Olivia Newton-John among the actresses she voiced regularly. Her Sandy in Grease, AISGE says, gave the Australian star “ingenuity and mischief.” She’s also worked as a stage actor, director and playwright, and in 2018 she received the honorary Butaca award named after Anna Lizaran.

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She hasn’t always loved the booth, and she’s said so in public. “For many years I had this crisis with dubbing. It’s been a constant love-hate relationship,” she said in a 2025 interview, as reported by XCatalunya. “I came to think it was my curse.”

AISGE’s own tribute doesn’t hide that either. It says she has felt typecast at times, believes she missed chances in film, and has spoken about the lack of roles for actresses past a certain age. Close to 70, she wrote and performed her own monologue, Vides de gos. In 2025 she published a family memoir, Seguint les ones, about her parents and the world of radio, theatre and dubbing they worked in.

She’s made her peace with the job too. “Dubbing in Catalonia has immense value, it’s part of our cultural and linguistic identity, and that’s something we must celebrate and look after,” she said in the same interview.

Luis Porcar: the famous voice who wanted no face

Porcar, born in Valencia in 1943, came to dubbing late and, by most accounts, by chance, after years in theatre, radio and television. “The chance came up to dub films and I didn’t think twice,” he told FormulaTV in 2009. “It went so well and I felt so comfortable that I decided to keep going down this road.”

Luis Porcar. Image: AISGE

His deep, layered voice became the Spanish sound of George Clooney as Dr. Doug Ross in ER, Richard Dean Anderson as Jack O’Neill in Stargate and, above all, Hugh Laurie as Gregory House. AISGE says it’s now almost impossible to imagine any of them speaking Spanish another way.

That fame sits awkwardly with a man who always argued that the character should be recognised, not the actor. “Personally I don’t like people putting a face to me,” he said in the same interview. “It’s better if people don’t see the people who dub the films.”

His view of the craft is the one AISGE chose to quote in its announcement: dubbing “means performing, imitating and understanding the spirit of a character, using only the voice as a tool.” Porcar put it more simply in 2009. “The hard part is finding the spirit of the character you’re dubbing.”

What working voice actors can take from Monday’s awards

Both careers carry lessons that travel well beyond Spain. Angelat’s is about range and patience: decades of work that the public heard every week, and the private cost of being heard more than seen. Porcar’s is about craft. He treated a dub as a performance in its own right, studied the original actor’s intent and rhythm, and let the character take the credit.

Porcar also saw the pace of the business change. “The way of dubbing when I started and the way now have nothing to do with each other,” he said in 2009. “Before, we did one thing in a morning and now you have to do four.” Any voice actor juggling three clients and a same-day deadline will know the feeling.

And there’s the plain fact of the award. A performers’ rights body is putting two dubbing actors on the stage of a Madrid theatre, beside screen stars and ballet dancers, and calling their work acting. Plenty of voice actors elsewhere are still waiting for that.

Sources: AISGE, “El Premio Actúa de AISGE aplaude las brillantes trayectorias de Marta Angelat y Luis Porcar como actores de voz” (October 7, 2026), plus AISGE announcements of the actress, actor and New Generation winners; Más Escena (dance winners); Infobae (Premio Pilar Bardem and HazTuAcción); XCatalunya (Marta Angelat, March 18, 2025); FormulaTV (Luis Porcar, May 26, 2009). Quotations from Spanish sources are translated by Voice Over Herald. Main image: the Nuevo Teatro Alcalá in 2009, when it was staging Grease, by Luis García (Zaqarbal), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Other photos: AISGE.

Lee este artículo en español: Las voces en español de Sandy y del Dr. House reciben hoy el Premio Actúa. Ella llegó a pensar que el doblaje era su maldición

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