Marisa Paredes, Pedro Almodóvar Star, Dies at 78

On December 18, 2024By Littum

Marisa Paredes, a grande dame of Spanish cinema, died on Tuesday in Madrid of heart failure. She was 78.

While she appeared in 75 films, she will be best remembered for the five films she appeared in directed by Pedro Almodóvar: “Dark Habits” (1983), “High Heels” (1991), “The Flower of My Secret” ( 1995), “All About My Mother” (1999) and “The Skin I Live In” (2011). Of all of these, she believed she delivered one of her career-best performances in “The Flower of My Secret,” which marks the beginning of Almodóvar’s return to his roots and his mother’s world, a reconnection that continues to this day .

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In “My Secret Flower,” Paredes played a chic romantic novelist who was seemingly a fish out of water at first in the village where she was born.

In real life, Paredes had a natural elegance, enhanced by her favorite dresses by the Spanish designer Sybille, which JA Bayona noted, reacting to her death, gave her “an aura of myth.” Still, he added, “she was kind, empathetic and always attentive.”

Paredes was born the daughter of a janitor in a poor post-civil war Spain in the working-class Plaza de Santa Ana in central Madrid. She appeared briefly in a Fernando Fernán Gómez masterpiece “El Mundo Sigue” (1965), but really cut her teeth in the classical theater, Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Ibsen, televised by the public broadcaster RTVE.

She continued to appear with Spain’s classic modern directors, starting with Fernando Trueba in his debut “Opera Prima” from 1980, in a role that tore her air of grand dame and showed her sense of humor. Later came the main roles, especially in Agustí Villaronga’s “In a Glass Cage” (1986), but also Mexican Arturo Ripstein’s “Deep Crimson” (1996) and “No One Writes to the Colonel” (1999) and Guillermo del Toro’s “The Devil’s Backbone” (2001).

Despite her glamour, however, she never forgot her own origins. Elected president of the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences, at the 2003 Goya Awards, she supported protests on stage by several winners against the support for the invasion of Iraq given by the right-of-center government of José María Aznar.

Paredes is survived by his decades-long partner Chema Prado, a former director of the Filmoteca Española, and her daughter, María Isasi.

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