María Galiana is ninety-one, holds awards other actors dream about, and spent twenty-two years in a series the whole of Spain watched. And she sat down in front of a microphone to say she threw that time away.

"The twenty-two years I spent on television doing Cuéntame cómo pasó gave me nothing. The grandmother, what a part!" That is not the sentence of someone who failed. It is the sentence of someone who succeeded and still knows exactly what was missing. The series began on 13 September 2001 and became household furniture - the kind of show people watch without ever deciding to watch it.

She went further: "Little, much or moderate time that I carry as an actress - for me, I spent it in vain. Twenty-two years playing a grandmother on television, that is throwing yourself away as an actress." She wanted films. She wanted good parts. She got the opposite - one role, well paid, endlessly repeated, in which the audience loved her precisely because she never changed.

That is not ingratitude, it is arithmetic

It is easy to read this as the whim of a woman who has everything. But she is talking about something far more concrete - the difference between being famous and being used up. The character that makes you recognisable also locks you in. A producer offering you twenty-two years of security is not offering twenty-two years of work; he is offering one job, repeated twenty-two times. You feel the difference only at the end.

So now she does theatre. Not as a hobby but as compensation - the place where the parts still change and where nobody pays her to be the same person for one more season.

Imanol Arias, her on-screen son-in-law, responded with warmth and a touch of irony: she does not like series, she likes tennis and Formula 1, and she has every right to say what she thinks. He will not defend her from her own opinion, and rightly so - at ninety-one that is the only decent reaction.

What is left is the uncomfortable part: how many people watched that series for twenty-two years thinking they were doing a favour to an actress they adored? The audience loved the grandmother. The actress was waiting for somebody to ask what else she could do.