Death of Marisa Paredes, muse of Pedro Almodovar

Death of Marisa Paredes, muse of Pedro Almodovar

The Spanish actress known for her iconic roles in High Heels and All About My Mother has died at the age of 78. Tribute.

Of Marisa Paredeswho has just passed away at the age of 78, immediately imprints the tragic faces of the heroines of Pedro Almodovar’s films with which she remains forever linked. Also reduced, because the actress will have struck the gaze of other filmmakers and not the least: Manoel de Oliveira, Amos Gitaï, Raoul Ruiz, Guillermo del Toro… What then brought her tirelessly back to one of the heroes of the movie? The scope of the roles offered.

In Almodovar, Paredes was a sovereign figure capable of containing all the emotions ready to burst onto the screen. Castrating singer with magnetic (omni)presence in Stiletto Heels (1991); Novelist lacking inspiration in The flower of my secret (1995) or even a totemic actress in All about my mother (1999, photo below) who, despite herself, tragically influences the fate of the characters… Almodovar used to say, in the form of a joke, that if Marisa Paredes had never been able to play all these women, he would have taken care of it himself.

For Almodovar, Paredes was the Pythia, an oracle that only souls disposed to lyrical and romantic outbursts could hear and understand. The two beings first had to tame each other. His first foray into the world of Almodovar dates back to 1983 with Into the darknesswhere she played the sister of a convent. This is how she described her beginnings with her future mentor in the columns of Le Monde in 2002:

…I asked lots of questions about my characters and Pedro didn’t want to give explanations, he was more effervescent, caught up in the romance of his talent. Then he offered me small things in other films, but I was busy elsewhere. I was playing Beckett in the theater when he gave me the gift of Becky del Paramo…”

Becky is the heroine of Stiletto Heels, the film that changed everything.

Marisa Paredes, raised under Franco’s Spain which saw the profession of actress as the illustration of a necessarily depraved life, inherited a sense of combat and revolt. A self-proclaimed feminist, she will find, thanks to Almodovar, a way to fully express it.

Feminism, I have always had it in me. Looking at the strength of my mother, the unfortunately mistreated place of women in history. Pedro Almodóvar has always had this sensitivity. He was imbued with that, me too: that’s what made, among other things, the strength of our meeting“, she admitted to the magazine Three Colors in 2023.

Among his many roles, let us remember that of The Devil’s Backbone by Guillermo del Toro (photo below), a fantastic film where she rediscovered through fiction the scent of Caudillo’s Spain. There she was Carmen, director of a Catholic establishment for orphans haunted in her flesh by the wounds of a History being written in blood. What is a ghost? questions this film produced by Pedro Almodovar. The character played by Marisa Paredes feels deep within herself the vibrations of an unattainable beyond. Only a great tragedian could express that without needing to say a word.

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