Marisa Paredes obituary: international Spanish star and vital Almodóvar collaborator

Marisa Paredes, who has died at the age of 78, oozed old school Hollywood glamour. She had verve, style and a veritable sense of mischief. Her presence and poise were deployed to compelling effect by Pedro Almodóvar in a series of films that cemented her international profile as an actor with a range spanning both the epic and the intimate.

Born into a working-class family in Madrid’s central Plaza de Santa Ana, she taught herself to read using a neighbour’s comic books. Attending school between 7 and 11 she began training at a dressmaker’s a year later and made her film debut at 14 as a prostitute, after having boldly approached José María Forqué, who was shooting Police Calling 091 (1960) close to her home. She enjoyed small roles in films by Fernando Fernán Gómez and Antoni Ribas as well as TV series, but during these years it was on stage where she cemented her reputation as an actor melding dramatic intelligence and discreet intensity.

First contracted at Madrid’s Comedia Theatre at the age of 16, she was given a big break standing in for a lead actor who had been taken ill, going on to specialise in roles as defiant, melancholy women in works by writers including Tennessee Williams, Ingmar Bergman, José Martín Recuerda and Peter Shaffer, including a series of acclaimed filmed performances for Spanish Television’s Estudio 1. 

She once told me that not looking Spanish had served as an advantage that allowed her to avoid typecasting. Her distinctive chiselled features, striking eyes and husky voice were matched by elegance, defiance and a stage presence increasingly deployed in film during the 1980s – beginning with her role as the porn actor Zoila Gómez in Fernando Trueba’s debut romcom Opera Prima (1980). 

She recognised her rich collaboration with Almodóvar – including during a public conversation as part of the BFI’s Almodóvar retrospective in 2016 – as unique and hugely fulfilling. The roles proved unforgettable: the acid-fuelled murderer Sister Manure in Dark Habits (1983); the diva torch singer Becky del Páramo in High Heels (1991); the troubled novelist Leo, navigating personal and professional crises, in The Flower of My Secret (1995). 

All About My Mother (1999) demonstrated her full dramatic range – melding a unique star quality with an earthy vibrant relationship to the Spanish language shaped by her distinctive smoky voice. As the loyal mother in The Skin I Live In (2011), she brought the unsettling quality that Agustí Villaronga and Guillermo del Toro had both drawn on respectively in the horror films In a Glass Cage (1986) and The Devil’s Backbone (2001). Her 75 plus films included works with Roberto Benigni, Jaime Rosales, Arturo Ripstein, Raúl Ruiz and, with Luis Miñarro, in the forthcoming Emergency Exit.

Paredes never forgot her working class roots, maintaining to the end a strong sense of social justice. A committed feminist – she spoke out earlier this year against domestic violence – her progressive left-wing politics came to the fore when, as president of The Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences of Spain in 2003, she led the industry’s protests against Spain’s support of the US invasion of Iraq. Paredes was never one to suffer fools gladly – I once witnessed her addressing a provocative comment by a right-wing politician with a winning mixture of grace and chutzpah.

At the time of her death, she was working on a new solo theatre piece with Lluís Pasqual, the director with whom she had realised two of her greatest stage roles: as the anguished actress in Lorca’s unfinished Play Without a Title (1989) and as a troubled Gertrude struggling to reconcile her responsibilities as queen and mother to Eduard Fernández’s Hamlet (2006).

Devoted to her partner of 41 years, Chema Prado – former director of the Spanish National Film Library – and her daughter María Isasi, also an actor, from an earlier relationship with the filmmaker Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi, she will be remembered as a star who gave form to some of the most memorable women in modern Spanish cinema.  

• Marisa Paredes, 3 April 1946 to 17 December 2024