Innocents was adapted into a film. The actors Alfredo Landa and Francisco Rabal received the actor's award at the Cannes Film Festival for their roles in the movie. In 1985, he published El tesoro (The Treasure) and received the Knight of Arts and Letters of the French Republic. In the following years he was named a favorite son of Valladolid, he published Castilla habla (Castile Speaks), got an honorary doctorate of the Complutense University of Madrid and attended the theatrical adaptation of works like The Red Leaf and The Wars of our Ancestors. His 1987 book Madera de héroe (The Stuff of Heroes) deals with the notion of heroism during the Spanish Civil War. It won the Premio Ciudad de Barcelona. On 7 May 1990, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Saarland University, Germany. A year later, on 30 May 1991, the Ministry of Culture awarded him the National Prize for Spanish Literature. The University of Málaga paid homage to him at the V Contemporary Spanish Literature Congress, under the title Miguel Delibes: the writer, his work and readers. That year, he published Señora de rojo sobre fondo gris (Lady in red on a grey background), a clear evocation of his wife. In the following year the Meeting with Miguel Delibes was held in Madrid. It was organized on the occasion of the National Prize for Spanish Literature and included a total of seven conferences and four round tables that dealt with the works of Miguel Delibes. Literary halt and final years His last major work, El hereje (The heretic), a tribute to Valladolid, was published in 1998 and was awarded the National Fiction Prize. When receiving the award, the author stated that at 79 years of age he "had hung up his writing tackle." At the beginning of the millennium, the Miguel Delibes Chair was founded. The chair has its seat at the universities of New York and Valladolid, and has as its objectives to promote the study of contemporary Spanish literature, make this literature known in the United States and disseminate it through new technologies. Following the publication of The heretic his writing career came virtually to a halt, mainly because of the colon cancer that affected the writer during the final phase of writing his last great novel. He was largely disabled and fell victim to an ever-greater apathy. His last book, La Tierra Herida (The