Portuguese actress Teresa Mota, wife of playwright Richard Demarcy and mother of actor and theater director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota died on January 1 in Paris from lung cancer.
She was 82 years old.
Her son, former head of the Théâtre de la Ville, paid a vibrant tribute to her memory and to her talent imbued with a high artistic sensitivity: “
Teresa had a taste for poetry deeply embedded in her.
She was poetry, strength and gentleness at the same time, she taught me to look at actresses and actors.
"
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In 1972 with her husband Emmanuel Demarcy, author of experimental plays and doctor in sociology at the Sorbonne, she founded the company Naïf Théâtre which was dedicated, from its beginnings, to the staging of contemporary writing essentially oriented to the left of the political chessboard.
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At 25, Teresa Mota, already noted in her country for her remarkable composition in
Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare, decides to leave Portugal, then still under the rule of the fascist dictator Antonio Salazar. Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota recalled his courage and his youthful engagement on the site dedicated to the living theater Sceneweb: “
She knew how to go into exile when she had everything in her country, wealth and glory. But she did not want to be recognized by the dictatorial regime.
"
In France, with the company Naïf Théâtre, feeling free to express all her ideas, she will be the first to mount
L'Ode Maritima
by Fernando Pessoa, a great Portuguese writer and poet with whom she shared the same democratic and libertarian spirit.
An interview with Teresa Mota, in 2018, as part of the
“Portuguese artists, an oral history” days
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