The iconoclastic Spaniard is due to receive tributes at Thursday's event from colleagues and admirers, including fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier, screenwriter Peter Morgan and fellow directors Stephen Frears and Sally Potter.

Almodovar is part of a creative generation that emerged after Spain ended decades of dictatorship in the late 1970s. His quirky and sometimes outrageous films helped launch the careers of Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem.

He found international success with "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" in 1988.

His 1999 movie "All About My Mother" won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, and Almodovar took the best original screenplay Oscar in 2002 for "Talk to Her."

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1. At 65, the director is still a "nervous wreck":

"It's not really fear. It's just much more of an anticipation of the unknown. And you know, the unknown could be food poisoning. It's just the kind of level of anxiety not being able to write my life as well as I can write my movies."   The only way the director can quench his anxiety is by writing, but after he's done with a film, "The fear comes right back," he says.

2.  As a kid, Steven Spielberg directed his parents, too:

Both of Spielberg's parents said that as a child, he got anything he wanted. Spielberg's mother, Leah Adler, said of her son, "Steve really did run us. He called the shots." Spielberg tells it a little differently, saying, "My mom didn't parent us as much as she sort of big-sistered us. She was Peter Pan. She refused to grow up."

3. He was bullied and denied his Judaism:

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