She turns 73 years old while hospitalized in Ciempozuelos

In a Spain that was learning to remove the corset of the dictatorship, cinema discovered many goddesses. One of them didn’t speak Spanish, but she didn’t need it either. All it took was her feline look, her marble figure and a sensuality that seemed sculpted on purpose to overflow the screens. Nadiuska, born Roswicha Bertasha Smid Honczar in Germany, It was the wet dream of a generation and the symbol of the revelation that, between feathers and broken censorship, sought to redefine an era.

The young German, who arrived in Spain when she was barely 20 years old, conquered the billboards of the 70s and 80s as the great muse of fast-moving erotic cinema, the kind that filled theaters and halls with its spicy comedies and exalted dramas and some of whose scripts Today they could be a crime. She was the reflection of a country that was awakening, and she was a queen in a world where brilliance, although dazzling, is always ephemeral.

It appeared in more than 40 films, becoming a cinematic fetish that did not need solid arguments to attract crowds. Among those films, The Last Voyage of the Vikings and Conan the Barbarian immortalized her face, but they also made it clear that the industry considered her more of a body than a soul. For the public, she was the Venus of a Spain that learned to look through the screen with less guilt and more desire. For those who handled it, it was nothing more than a puppet that was dazzled by its own reflection.

However, behind the myth there was a single woman. Her co-stars describe her as distant, a lost soul who seemed to move by inertia in a world that didn’t listen to her. Perhaps because he was never taught to be more than a spectacle, or because the lights of success always bring with them dense shadows.

It all ended the way non-fairy tales end: in one fell swoop. Nadiuska faced the cruel fate of so many stars of the time: being devoured by a sexist and mercantilist society that, once squeezed out of her youth and beauty, threw her away like a broken toy. As time went by, the contracts stopped coming and the friendships vanished like smoke. The fall was brutal.

Love, which could have been her refuge, became hell. In the midst of her collapse, rumors began to circulate about her relationship with King Juan Carlos I. Years later, she herself would confirm it, stating that the monarch had been “her boyfriend” in the years of greatest splendor. But the actress also said that this bond, as clandestine as it was powerful, attracted enemies into her life. “They wanted to get rid of me because they didn’t like us being together,” he once confessed. Paranoia trapped her and turned her life into a labyrinth of fear. She covered the windows of her apartment in Chamberí with black sheets, convinced that she was being watched, harassed by ghosts that perhaps never existed.

The psychological abyss

Over time, Nadiuska disappeared from public view. The paparazzi stopped looking for her, and when they did again, it was only to publish sensational images of a woman who no longer looked like the star she once was. She was admitted to hospitals, treated for mental problems and, on several occasions, attempted to end her life.. Today, three weeks after turning 73, Nadiuska lives in the Ciempozuelos Sanatorium, under the care of the Hospitaller Sisters. There is hardly any trace left of that woman who once symbolized the beauty and liberation of an era. Salvador Herráiz, one of the few friends she has left, speaks of her tenderly: “She has her good and bad days, like everyone. But sometimes she seems calmer than before.”

In recent years, the writer Valeria Vegas has returned to Nadiuska some of its lost brilliance with The Nadiuska Enigma, a novel that reexplores her figure as an icon and as an enigma. But the reality that surrounds the actress today is far from the glamor that once defined her.

The walks through Ciempozuelos, when your health allows, are the only moments of contact with the outside world. However, recent vision problems have further confined her to the solitude of her confinement. Although her days as a star were buried under the weight of time, Nadiuska is her living reflection of the contradictions of fame: a beacon that burns those who get too close.

Nadiuska’s story, as splendorous as it is tragic, is not just that of a forgotten actress. It is a mirror of the fragility of ephemeral idols, of the manufactured illusions that we project on them and of how the industry, the public and society consume and abandon their prey without mercy.

Today, while she waits for her birthday in a discreet corner of the south of Madrid’s Conunidas, Nadiuska is more than just a 73-year-old woman. It is a symbol of an era and a warning. Because behind every star there is a person, and behind every person, a soul that fights not to fall apart. In Nadiuska’s case, that fight is not over yet.