“This is Zulueta.
Look: 'Marisa is Félix'.
Because she was playing María Félix in the theater.
But it's that play on words, right?
Felix,
happy.
“Marisa is happy.”
Marisa Paredes (Madrid, 77 years old) points out five paintings, each one with a letter, MARISA, signed by Iván Zulueta, that hang in the long hallway of her apartment, in the center of Madrid.
He points to a photo on the shelf in his living room, “Diego Galán,” he says, and then above, “the Goya of Honor,” and smiles at the award that the Film Academy gave him in 2018, placed among five Silver Frames. and an ICON award.
It points out above: “The Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts,” it says, “that this king emeritus, this thief, gave me, when [2007] it was not known what he was stealing,” and a banner on the left: “ From my last demonstration, for Palestine,” he says.
She points out below, a photo of Pedro Almodóvar with, precisely, Juan Carlos I, after winning the Oscar for
All About My Mother
(1999), in which she co-starred.
And she silently points out, in a corner, a black and white photo, from the mid-20th century, of a foreshortened woman with a smile of supreme exhaustion.
"My mom," he says.
Now we are in the most intimate part.
Marisa Paredes finally remembers everything.
Maybe better than before.
“I went into depression about four years ago,” she announces, pacing the living room in baggy black clothes, sneakers, and a red cashmere scarf, her favorite color.
“They thought, they discovered, they decided that I was bipolar cyclothymic… Well, a way of saying that you have ups and downs like everyone else.
"Sometimes sharper, given my sensitivity and temperament."
That journey through darkness has passed, or is giving a respite, and Paredes, with renewed grace and self-government, has returned to work, with a role in the last chapters of
Vestidas de azul
(Atresplayer), a Javis production (“Son the arrival of something totally new”, he celebrates).
It is the last work in a career of six decades, one of the most distinguished in Spanish interpretation: Paredes' name is forever tied to that of Pedro Almodóvar, for his legendary collaboration in the classics
Entre tinieblas
(1983),
Tacones distantas
(1991 ),
The flower of my secret
(1995),
All about my mother
and
The skin I live in
(2011).
But it is also an essential presence in the theater, immortalized in countless works broadcast in
Studio 1
of RTVE, as well as in the filmography of many of the greatest Spanish-speaking filmmakers, from Agustí Villaronga
(Tras el cristal,
1986) to Arturo Ripstein
(Profundo Crimson,
1986) through Guillermo del Toro
(The Devil's Backbone,
2001).
Today, she regrets having had to turn down a role for Yorgos Lanthimos, who is now up for an Oscar for
Poor Creatures.
The Depression.
“I have always been given special characters,” he grabs a cigarette.
“I have been lucky that, since I don't look Spanish, I'm not Concha Velasco or these great ones, when television was cultured and they showed theater, I did all the dramas of Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Ibsen.
It was the Russian soul.
The great drama.”
Because?
“Because I have it!
“That deep thing.”
That
deep thing
is none other than her presence, tough but vulnerable, like a wounded lion, which has so many times put her in the shoes of prostitutes and drinkers (“I don't know how to be alcoholic anymore”).
She roots it, like her ideology, so left-wing, so much like a card-carrying feminist when feminism was not popular, in her hungry, post-war childhood, the youngest of four siblings in a working-class family in the Plaza de Santa Ana de Madrid.
Lucio, the father, worked in a beer factory.
Her mom — her name was Petra but she doesn't call her anything other than “mom” — was a goalkeeper.
She remembers her now.
And, with her, Dioni, Úrsula, Lola, Carmen Maura.
“Women, women, women.”
This is highlighted a lot: the help of women, a constant throughout her life.
She will repeat it a lot for the next two hours.
Now she looks for another photo, in black and white, more the second than the first.
“This is me, exactly in the Plaza de Santa Ana, in a tree that no one had yet cut down, in 1952. That is, I was six years old…”
Something activates in her head and translates into a nostalgic glow in her eyes.
“Look at his face, he's already serious,” she says, in the present tense.
Then she returns: “When I was little I was very adult.
That's why I have this look.
“That girl has always been there.”
Marisa Paredes poses exclusively for ICON with her own stole and gloves and DOLCE&GABBANA dress.ALBERTO GARCÍA-ALIX
And there it is still, on the shelf, next to Baudelaire.
I've always wanted to read.
I had to leave school when I was 11 years old.
It belonged to the Daughters of Charity, on Mesón de Paredes Street.
The rich women entered through that door, and they wore another blue uniform;
We poor women entered through Provisiones Street and wore a white babi with a red bow.
They didn't even bring us together at recess.
They had it at one time and we had it at another.
This was like that.
The class difference was very clear.
One day I asked my mother why we were poor.
She told me: “This is inherited, daughter, just like the other.”
Being rich is inherited, and so is being poor.
That, I have that here [points to his head].
At 12 I started working as a dressmaker in a fashion house, on Bravo Murillo Street, owned by Mr. Tormo.
He called me Pajarito, like a character from Galdós.
But did you already want to be an actress?
Since she was five years old.
Can you explain that vocation?
That's living in the Plaza de Santa Ana and having the Spanish Theater in front of you.
Within that terrible, gray post-war period of the dictatorship, I saw the actors passing through the square, I knew they were actors because they went to the theater at the same time every day, and I said: “I want to be there.”
Because there, I remember this reflection very well, other things happen.
My life and all this misery that we are living, all this grayness... that doesn't happen there.
I had never seen a play, but I did hear, on the radio, on a Telefunken that my mother bought on installment, the radio soap operas that were broadcast at that time.
That is the first memory I have of something dramatic, of fiction, of theater: listening to SER, Radio Madrid it was called then.
I breathed all that and it made me boil.
How did he get it?
He went with a little friend to the doors of the theaters, that "give me a chance", but without a sign, like the bullfighters or the suitcases.
Let's see if anyone sees me.
Let's see if someone tells me what you're doing here.
Did it work for you?
I got my first role in a film by José María Forqué
[091, Police speaking
,
1960].
They were filming in the square, I went over to see if they could see me and someone told me I don't know what about a prostitute or something.
"Would you like it?".
I go out in a red suit.
Already in red.
You already know that I am an Aries, and the color of Aries is red.
And already as a prostitute, at 14 years old.
Yes, well, she was already very tall, very lanky, and very cheeky.
She had a body.
But his beginnings were in the theater.
One day, an actress, at the door of the Comic Theater, which no longer exists, near Preciados Street, told me: “But what are you doing here?
Do you want to be an actress or what?”
And I said: "Yes." And he told me: "Well, look, I'm going to talk to Lilí Murati", who was the businesswoman of that company, "because I'm leaving and maybe you can replace me." The doors of the office opened to me. heaven. Lilí Murati, a Hungarian with
a long seat,
told me: “Well, yes, it could be.” Naturally, I thought: “I pay this one two dollars, much less than the professional who is leaving me.”
So it was?
It's just that I couldn't be there.
I got home and first told Mom, the accomplice, the protector: “I've managed to get hired, the young lady!
[as opposed to the leading lady].”
To my father, a man of that time, the idea of me devoting myself to this world of theater seemed not just like perdition, but rather like him throwing me into the gutter.
“But come on, you're 15 years old!
Before dead!
“You are dead, I am dead.”
He knew the world of the night but not because he went out but because he had night shifts at the El Águila brewery.
Marisa Paredes poses exclusively for ICON dressed in GAULTIER.ALBERTO GARCÍA-ALIX
Your father is so tough and you are such a feminist.
I remember arguments between my father and mother.
They got along terribly.
“This shirt is not ironed properly!”
My father was a very gentleman, he went with his white shirt on Sunday not to mass, it wasn't his cool thing, but to have a beer at the German Brewery.
And if he didn't like the way the white shirt was ironed, he would throw it away and say, “This shirt isn't right.”
I have experienced that situation of mistreatment, of humiliation, that machismo at that time represented.
How not to become a feminist?
I remember my mother, talking about politics once, that at home dad was quite right-wing: “The only moment where I have felt free was with the Republic.”
I heard this when I was six, seven years old.
And she understood it.
How did you manage to get on stage?
I went on hunger strike.
We were already hungry, but more so.
She was 15 years old when she got frustrated with Lilí Murati.
The age of majority at that time for women was 21: she needed my father's permission for everything.
“Well, look at this face, because you won't see her again as soon as she turns 21!
You will never see her again in your life!”
I locked myself in the only room we had.
We had two rooms, without a bathroom, the toilet was in the kitchen, that tells you everything.
“I go into the room, and I won't eat or sleep until you let me do the theater!”
And won.
After a day and a half, my mother said: “Hey, Lucio, this girl is going to get sick, please.”
"No, because two performances... end at one in the morning... they are all unfortunate, unfortunate, bad women, no, no, no, not my artist daughter."
Mom then said: “Look, I'm going to look for her when the play ends at one in the morning.
“I bring her home.”
And he went on stage.
Because from the Teatro de la Comedia, which today is the Classic Theater company, you only have to cross the Plaza de Santa Ana to get home.
And the opportunity that had arisen for me was there with Conchita Montes, a work by José López Rubio,
This Night Neither
(1961).
I was worthy and acted as Montserrat Salvador's maid.
She called me Pilar.
Conchita's maid was Carmen Sainz de la Maza, a very important character.
One day Carmen had to have surgery, I remember, for some kidney surgery.
We didn't have a telephone, naturally, but then the assistant director came to my house and told me: “Marisa, if you dare to replace Carmen Sainz de la Maza.”
And I said yes, trembling.
I happened to have Carmen de la Maza's dressing room, which was much bigger, it was like
Eva naked
.
And there I stood.
Did you ever get your father's approval as an actress?
In 1968 I made my first
Study 1.
The buyer of hours
,
a work by Jacques Deval, version by José María Pemán.
She played a prostitute, once again, a French woman, during the construction of the Panama Canal.
The broadcast was a bombshell.
In those years there was only television, there were only two channels, and there was only that to watch.
When my father went to the factory the next day, he was called by the director, who at that time was Don Manuel Fraga Iribarne.
And he told him: “Lucio Paredes, they told me that the actress from last night is your daughter.”
My father was stunned.
We didn't even have a television at home.
“Well yes, sir, she is my daughter.”
“But she is very good, you have to be very proud of her.”
There my father, for the first time, believed what Fraga Iribarne told him, that he was a cultured man and was the boss.
That I was very good.
Then he breathed.
She wasn't meant for the creek.
He wouldn't get to cinema seriously until the eighties.
I thought the movie camera and I were a bit at odds.
Just as Studio 1 had very clear video and perfectly controlled the three cameras that were there then, cinema did not... Carmen Maura told me that you have to love the camera and let it love you.
When did you change your mind?
When I saw
Behind the Glass
I understood that the camera and I could have something in common.
That I could use it.
Villaronga came to Madrid, because he lived in Barcelona, to ask me to do it.
At that time I had prestige as an actress but I had not done anything important in film.
Western, comedy, everything, but never a success.
She told me: “Let's meet in a place where there are trees.”
She called me, I don't know if in the Retiro, in the Casa de Campo, in the Dehesa de la Villa or in the Pardo.
Nature was very important to him.
There he brought me a script where he had drawn the entire story, shot by shot, and I was able to see each set, the costumes.
My hair.
And I said, “Okay, now I see what you see, now I see myself in a movie.”
By then she was already an
Almodóvar girl
,
for
Entre tinieblas.
That was coined when we took it to the Venice festival.
We were all women,
ragazze,
and since there were many of us, when the journalists wanted to take photos of us,
“ragazze, dove sono le ragazze”,
where are the girls.
There was always one missing, who was having a coffee: the world of promotion was not as well organized as it is now.
The
Almodóvar girls
were the group of nuns.
The model dresses as a photographer: Marisa Paredes poses exclusively for ICON with glasses, jacket and scarf by Alberto García-Alix.ALBERTO GARCÍA-ALIX
You are not the artist with whom Almodóvar has made the most films, but possibly, along with Maura, you are the one with whom he has made the most indisputable films.
The flower of my secret...
[His face lights up]
The flower.
My best movie.
“Oh Betty…”
[Huge smile] “…except drinking, how difficult everything is for me.”
Or: “Is there any possibility, however small, of saving what is ours?”
All my life I have tried to make my work exciting because it shows.
When people see me on the street and say those phrases to me, they either tell me: “Smoke is the only thing that has ever been in my life,” from
All About My Mother,
or they tell me: “Thank you, because I have learned from you.” or with you I have felt”, “that scene from
Faraway Heels”…
it is because as you have said it with your soul, that has reached people.
Of course, the basis of everything is the script.
[Points to the shelf] We have a shared Oscar there for
All About My Mother.
Did Pedro give that plastic Oscar to each actress symbolically after he received his?
What detail.
Man, what less.
Sorry.
I mean, I'm leaving.
Who had gotten him that Oscar?
We had the award in Cannes for the entire team, the Palme d'Or is here.
Your international exposure grew but you did not stray far from your past.
I see there the photo of a shoot in Paris in 1993... to which you took your mother, the doorkeeper.
But I owe everything to the goalkeeper!
I would not have been able to dedicate myself to this if that concierge, apart from teaching me, making me feel, what a person was, and telling me: "You do what you want, I couldn't," had not convinced my father and, furthermore, it would not have taught me, with sensitivity, what life and work and effort were.
And the importance of seeking freedom.
Many people, as soon as they shine a spotlight on their face, tend to reinvent themselves.
To glamorize yourself, to be liked by fashion brands.
You are not.
Not anymore.
Personality, that's what it's called.
Have it.
Let's see, fashion for example.
Carmen Maura says: “You just put on a cloth and look like a model, damn it.”
It's true.
I'm thin, that helps a lot, I've always been 38, now I'm 40. When you were poor in those years, you had to invent clothes, because you didn't have any.
For example, to see Conchita Montes and be worthy, I wore a coat from my aunt Dioni, the maid of a wonderful marchioness who, in turn, had been given to her by the lady marchioness.
That coat, beautiful, I remember, dark blue, I wore it without a collar.
And since hats had that importance then, my aunt Úrsula lined a basket that was in my house for me, a straw thing to put a flower pot inside. I don't know why it was at home because there were no flower pots.
She lined it with black cloth and I put it on with some of my sister's heels.
That's how I went to see Conchita Montes.
She seemed older and I already had an air of defiance to understand us.
Because she was the goalkeeper's daughter, because she had left a school where the rich entered from one side and the poor from the other.
00:24
This is how the actress Marisa Paredes reacts to the presence of Ayuso in the burning chapel of Concha Velasco
He recently went through a moment of viral fame for his reaction to the presence of Isabel Díaz Ayuso in the funeral chapel of Concha Velasco: “What is she doing here?
Out!
Let him go!”
That came to me in a totally spontaneous way.
But it was not counted well: I said “get out” joining the people who were already shouting it behind me.
Then there was someone who told me: “Man, maybe it wasn't the time.”
Sorry, the moments are not chosen.
He also attends the demonstrations against
Mayor Almeida's intention
to cut down trees in the Plaza de Santa Ana .
I increasingly believe in civil society as key to the advancement of society.
I believe in associations.
Politicians always have their commitments and go as far as they go, but civil society... José Luis Sampedro said it, if the people realized the strength they have, things would change sooner.
But people don't think and vote.
We vote for this one or that one, some with ideology, but others without any ideology, out of inertia.
If people realized that they have the power, things would be different.
Are you still linked to the area?
My granddaughter, Telma, blessed glory the arrival of Telma, lives next door, in the Plaza del Ángel in an apartment that I bought for my daughter when she had the most important moment economically, that Almodóvar provided me, with films in France, in Italy, even in Germany.
It wasn't much either.
Here people think that the actors...
María Isasi, also an actress…
Extraordinary actress.
Marisa Paredes poses exclusively for ICON dressed in PRADA.ALBERTO GARCÍA-ALIX
She was born during the relationship she had in the seventies with the filmmaker Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi.
I have never married, on principle.
With Antonio I was left with a kind of
American way of life
in Monteclaro (Pozuelo) and Majadahonda.
[Nostalgic] We had 3,000 meters of plot.
3,000.
But lucky because Antonio was not a millionaire, eh?
He was a very good director.
[Pause].
But, in the end, things last as long as they have to last.
Or less.
[Pause].
The truth is that in seven years that was over.
The separation was traumatic, tremendous.
Now he is with the photographer Chema Pardo.
40 years contemplate us.
This relationship has been sustained because we have both traveled a lot, each on her side.
I to my festivals, he to his.
Otherwise, we would have killed each other, of course.
We met when we took Entre tinieblas to the Seville festival.
Did he say about their separation?
She had been out of work for a long time.
Of course, living in Pozuelo and Majadahonda... It was difficult for me to start over.
The professional life that had cost me so much, with so much luck... When I returned to the theater, the girl was four years old and she could have, for example, the typical cold, the typical fever.
The anguish that I went through from the house in Monteclaro until arriving at the theater, thinking that the girl had a fever and that we were 20 kilometers away, was terrifying.
When I separated, Lola Salvador, a great friend, great screenwriter and great person, accompanied me to look for a house.
I had never searched in my life, I didn't know where to start or what to look for.
“Women, women, women.”
That's how we got here, which was an old house in a mess.
Lola told me: “It's here.
You have the María Guerrero theater there, the Infanta here, the Español in five, ten minutes walking you arrive;
If there is a taxi strike you arrive, if there is a metro strike too.
I mean, this is your house, Marisa.”
I saw it very clearly.
We arrived here.
Since then I haven't moved.
Only hours later, with the interview already concluded and too late to ask the actress, the journalist will realize that Paredes has set his house, and that of his daughter, based on the proximity of the theaters and the Plaza de Santa Ana, respectively.
The same thing that she allowed her mother to guarantee her that first role in her day, by going to look for her in the theater and taking her home every night.
That is where the actress has stayed, where she announces that we are in the most intimate part and where she has hung five paintings that say: “Marisa is
felix.”
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