There was a time when Miki Molina, son of the legendary Spanish singer Antonio Molina and brother of actress Angela Molina, filled the headlines of Spanish tabloids. A 90s star, with a reputation as a rebel and ladies' man, husband to Lidia Bosch - one of the most popular TV faces of that time. Wedding in 1994, divorce in 1995. One year. Everything was fast, like in his life - until he decided to do something radical.

Today he lives in a place with only six neighbours. A nearly abandoned village in Spain, surrounded by chickens and cows. In an interview for „El Mundo", Molina explains without emotion that he lives „outside the system" - and that there he found a peace no scene and no camera could ever give him.

„In that sense - I've won. My life isn't sped up, it has a different tempo," says the actor. A sentence that lands differently in the Balkans than in the West. Here, six neighbours in a village would mean poverty, a flight from the city, failure. There - it is luxurious wealth. When a rich Spanish actor can afford to vanish into the mountains, that is status. In the Balkans, those six neighbours in the village are the father and the mother who stayed behind while the children left for a Greek or German oven.

Molina isn't the first famous person to pull back, and he won't be the last. From Greta Garbo to Daniel Day-Lewis, there's a whole tradition of stars who want fame, get it, and then decide they don't need it. The difference with Molina is that this doesn't look like a crisis or a scandal. It looks like the decision of a man who simply stopped pretending he needed something the industry was offering him.

His split from Lidia Bosch in 1995, when their daughter Andrea was three years old, was marked by the tabloid darkness of that era. Bosch went on to remain a TV face, he - vanished from the scene. Nobody asked him why. Maybe because in the Spanish celebrity industry there is an unwritten rule: the man always decides alone. The woman always has to give an explanation.

The question every middle-aged man could ask himself is a different one. Did Molina find something, or run from something? Do those six neighbours on the lane make him happier than the colleagues still fighting for photoshoots and campaigns? He says he's won. The world will decide whether that's a victory or the most successful retreat manoeuvre in the 90s Spanish soap opera.