Paredes, Marisa

(1946- )

   Marisa Paredes was born in Madrid. She studied acting and, since the 1960s, had a strong career as a dramatic actress onstage and also in a series of television classics, including Shakespeare and Chekhov parts, for which she won critical praise. Her film roles, however, were for decades very short and unsubstantial, sometimes in commercial co-productions. Until the 1990s, she is only remembered for her part as a drug-addicted nun in Pedro Almodóvar's Entre tinieblas (Dark Habits, 1983). A risk-taking actress, she also accepted roles in Agustí Villaronga's Tras el cristal (Behind the Glass, Agustí Villaronga, 1987).

   Paredes' revelation as an actress who could carry a film came with her portrayal of Becky del Páramo in Almodóvar's Tacones lejanos (High Heels, 1991), playing a glittering stage diva who was the selfish mother to Victoria Abril's brittle Rebeca. From that moment on, her film career took off and she had a number of parts as a mature, glamorous, sophisticated woman in La reina anónima (The Anonymous Queen, Gonzalo Suárez, 1992), Tierno verano de lujurias y azoteas (Tender Summer of Lust and Rooftops, Jaime Chávarri, 1993) and, more recently Reinas (Queens, Manuel Gómez Pereira, 2005), in which her character as a diva who worked with Almodovar had an element of self-parody. She was outstanding as a woman writer on the verge of suicide in Almodóvar's La flor de mi secreto (The Flower of My Secret, 1995), a moving performance that successfully balanced the demand of classic melodrama's "wounded soul" with Almodóvar's irony. She would return to work with the director in a supporting part in Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother, 1999).

   Paredes has appeared in a number of international productions, including Amos Gitai's Golem, l'esprit de l'exil (1992); Daniel Schmid's Zwischensaison (1992), in which she played Sarah Bernhard; Arturo Ripstein's Profundo carmesí (Deep Crimson, 1996), Roberto Begnini's Life Is Beautiful (Roberto Begnini, 1997), and Francesca Joseph's Four Last Songs (2007). Paredes was president of the Academia de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas between 2000 and 2003.

   Historical Dictionary of Spanish Cinema by Alberto Mira