Death of Marisa Paredes, masterful actress and figure of Almodóvar’s cinema

She became known thanks to the Spanish director for whom she shot six films, including “Stilettos” and “All About My Mother”. Marisa Paredes was 78 years old.

Din front of the red curtain of a theater, in Stiletto heels (1991), she was a magnificent apparition, a singing diva greeting her audience with a « Good evening, Madrid », before interpreting Think of me. The curtain fell on the Spanish actress Marisa Paredes, who died on December 17, 2024 at the age of 78. We will think for a long time of this woman whose passion for the dramatic art was expressed through a willingly changing temperament, made of discretion, almost of self-effacement, as well as of laughter and intensity.

Her freedom inevitably inspired the young Pedro Almodóvar, who chose her to be one of the hallucinated nuns in his cult comedy Into the darkness (1983). But it was above all her path to maturity that she helped the talented troublemaker to find. With Stiletto heels, she became a masterful interpreter of the most melodramatic emotions, spectacular in her role as a heartless mother comically composing her appearance, before delivering her truth on her deathbed. The Flower of my secret (1995), the pinnacle of her collaboration with Almodóvar, revealed her even more impressive, skinned alive in the role of a writer specializing in romantic novels but condemned to a sentimental life of suffering and solitude. In All about my mother (1999), she played what could have been her own role: a very great actress, with a sharp and philosophical eye, a woman made for the life of an artist.

Born on April 3, 1946, Marisa Paredes had, from her childhood in Madrid, been attracted to the theater, where she found her place by imposing her will, her family and society showing her another path. Having appeared in front of the camera in 1960, she built a solid but strictly Iberian career. Her position as Almodóvar’s muse brought her recognition and new artistic adventures, with Raoul Ruiz (Three Lives and One Death, 1996), Roberto Benigni (Life is beautiful, 1997) or Arturo Ripstein (Deep carmine, 1996, No letter for the colonel, 1999). In France, she inspired directors attracted by a comedy with sought-after tones, Philippe Lioret (Fallen from the sky, 1993) or Thierry Klifa (His mother’s eyes2011). Also ready to enter worlds where horror mixed with cruel memories of Franco’s Spain (crystal prison, 1987, The Devil’s Backbone, 2001), Marisa Paredes put her natural elegance at the service of visions that are never banal. She was the actress of curiosity, enthusiasm, research, open to demanding, intellectual inspirations, as well as to the immediate seduction of the characters of extraordinary women, who suited her so well.