“He felt bad and went to the hospital with his inseparable Chema to never leave again”

The night closed with a dull hum over Madrid, the city that saw her born, grow and say goodbye. “His heart was broken”a very close person tells us. Marisa Paredes, the actress with a broken voice and imposing presencethe daughter of the concierge of number 13 Plaza de Santa Ana, entered the Jiménez Díaz Foundation this Tuesday, accompanied by her inseparable Chema Prado, and never left again. The heart, that stubborn and often cruel organ towards passionate souls, decided to put an end to a life that was overflowing from every crevice. The news, which shakes moviegoers and Spanish theater, is as solemn as it is: Marisa Paredes has died at the age of 78, leaving behind a biography that seems like a script for a Russian tragedy, tinged with glory and rebellion.

From the girl who fantasized about the stage from the porch of a goal to the great lady of Pedro Almodóvar’s cinema, Marisa Paredes never allowed herself the luxury of being ordinary. When you think of her, you imagine her with a half-consumed cigarette, her gaze fixed on infinity and that mature, broken voice, capable of filling the silence of a room. An actress who, as she herself said, She did not have a “Spanish look”, which allowed her to embody the deepest, most complex women, those who walk on the edge of the precipice with their lips painted red..

In his last days, Marisa was preparing her return to the theater with the help of Lluís Pasqual. Full of the future, that was the name of the monologue that was scheduled to premiere in 2025. A title that now resonates with the cruel paradox of death. Marisa, between verses by Miguel Hernández and songs that Serrat would have whispered as a lullaby, planned to return to that intimate space where her voice, now without characters, could confess to the public. The years had not diminished his genius; They had only tempered it, like an ancient sword.

“They’ve killed compadre Turino!” he shouted at the age of fourteen in his first film role. That phrase, a line lost between black and white frames, was the origin of everything. Víctor Vadorrey, screenwriter and director, heard it and decided to send it to the Teatro de la Comedia, where Conchita Montes was rehearsing. It was there where Marisa began her pilgrimage on stage and where life showed her its true face: that of the dramas of Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Ibsen. Always, she said, “that deep thing” accompanied her, a Russian sadness that she seemed to have inherited in another life.

But if anyone fixed his name in the history of cinema it was Pedro Almodóvar. He knew how to see what few could: the light and shadows of a woman who could be a diva and mother at the same time, desolate and sublime, like Becky del Páramo in Far Heels or Amanda Gris in The flower of my secret. With Almodóvar she reached that peak where actresses become eternal. Together they created a handful of characters that still breathe in the collective memory, as if they had existed off the screen..

However, Marisa was never just a muse. If you imagine her presiding over the Film Academy in the years of “No to war”, one sees her with the look of someone who has already seen everything and fears nothing. That night in 2003, with a shoebox full of stickers, the actress and an entire profession came out to say no to the Iraq war. It was an act of freedom, a gesture of collective dignity in a country that was then seething with indignation. Marisa Paredes, who never needed a cause to be brave, became the voice of everyone.

Committed to the end, the last time her voice resonated strongly was in July 2023. From a political stage, she raised her gaze against the new inquisitors who threaten culture. “But what is this? How can they be so afraid of freedom?” she asked with that mixture of anger and sadness that only she knew how to combine. He didn’t say it with fuss or grandiloquence; He said it with the weight of a life where freedom was always the greatest achievement.

In her privacy, Marisa was a refuge of calm. Together with Chema Prado, his partner since 1983, he found the balance that was often missing in the scripts he interpreted. From their apartment in Torres Blancas, that architectural jewel of Madrid, they prepared potato omelettes for Malkovich and Bertolucci, improvised dinners with Padrón peppers and received old friends who arrived with their hands full of stories. There, among books and memories, Marisa was happy.

He leaves behind a daughter, María, “the flower of my life”, as he used to say. As a result of her relationship with Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi, María Isasi inherited the love of acting, becoming another branch of that family tree that is rooted in Spanish cinema.

Today, Madrid wakes up with a wound in its memory. The burning chapel of Marisa Paredes is located in the San Isidro funeral homebut one imagines his spirit wandering through the Plaza de Santa Ana, through the dressing rooms of the Spanish Theater or through those corners of the city where life once seemed enough to him. Because if Marisa Paredes left something behind, in addition to unforgettable characters, it was the certainty that life must be lived with elegance, with commitment and with the courage of those who are not afraid to look into the void.

Marisa has left the scene, but her voice will continue to sound between verses by Miguel Hernández, in Aute’s songs and in Chekhov’s monologues. Today, like so many other nights, Becky del Páramo sings again. But this time he does it silently. The excited audience knows that there will be no encore.