Marisa Paredes, an award-winning actress who was considered one of the great divas of Spanish film, gaining international acclaim for her work with the renowned director Pedro Almodóvar, died on Tuesday in Madrid. She was 78.
Her death was announced by the Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences of Spain. She was president of the academy from 2000 to 2003.
The news and culture site Hola! reported that Ms. Paredes had been feeling ill early on Tuesday and was admitted to a Madrid hospital, accompanied by her partner, the filmmaker Chema Prado.
Appearing in more than 75 films since 1960, Ms. Paredes was known for her mischievous comedic touch and an ability to mine the depths of her characters — “strong, ambivalent, torn, passionate, enigmatic and ultimately very human women,” as the academy described them in a statement.
While her early films and her many appearances on Spanish television received little attention outside her native country, Ms. Paredes eventually made waves internationally, appearing in Roberto Benigni’s “Life Is Beautiful,” a 1997 film that won three Academy Awards. She played the mother-in-law of Mr. Benigni’s character, who attempts to survive on humor and imagination after he and his son are sent to a German concentration camp during World War II.
She also drew praise for her role as Carmen, a stoic leftist teacher with a wooden leg who struggles to survive at a boarding school in the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s “The Devil’s Backbone,” a 2001 horror-tinged film set during the Spanish Civil War.
But she was best known internationally for her roles in several films by Mr. Almodóvar, widely hailed as Spain’s greatest living filmmaker.
Their working relationship began in 1983 with “Dark Habits,” a the black comedy about a nightclub singer running from the law who takes refuge in a convent populated by nuns with a taste for soft-core pornographic literature and drugs. (Their motto is “Sin is our chosen path.”) Ms. Paredes played Sister Manure, the resident psychedelics aficionado.
While her decades-long collaboration with Mr. Almodóvar was mutually beneficial, it was not without its complications — in part, because of Ms. Paredes’s acting process. As Mel Gussow wrote in 2001 in The New York Times, “Whatever the movie, Ms. Paredes is known for besieging her director with questions: ‘Why do I do that? Where do I come from? Why do I think those thoughts? And what kind of books would my character read?’”
The demanding Mr. Almodóvar also bore some responsibility for their choppy relationship, which included an extended period of not speaking to each other. A 1996 profile of Ms. Paredes in The Guardian noted that the director looked “like a petulant boy” and was “renowned for living up to the description on set.”
“He says that I asked too many questions; I was a little too mouthy, a little too arrogant,” Ms. Paredes told The Guardian. “He said that I didn’t deliver myself fully, that I insisted on rationalizing what I was doing. Not something he liked. And he was right. I’m a very methodical actress, a little too concerned about the whys and wherefores of things.”
Regardless, she was one of Mr. Almodóvar’s most valued collaborators, playing what Mr. Gussow described as “sexy, openhearted women with strong creative instincts.” They included onetime pop star in “High Heels” (1992), a popular romance novelist in “The Flower of My Secret” (1995) and a celebrated actress in “All About My Mother” (1999).
Later, Ms. Paredes appeared in Mr. Almodóvar’s 2011 thriller “The Skin I Live In,” turning in a “spikily human, funny” performance, Manohla Dargis wrote in The Times, as the fanatically loyal housekeeper of a wealthy, deranged plastic surgeon (Antonio Banderas).
In the Guardian interview, Ms. Paredes discussed why much of her work had failed to travel beyond Spain. “I was offered the most unexpected films,” she said. “I did them because they interested me artistically. Filmmaking for its own sake never interested me, and the same goes for being a film star.”
She added: “I have not been offered many commercial films, but then I don’t really fit the girl-next-door-let’s-see-what-happens-to-her roles … until Almodóvar turned up and turned me into a chica Almodóvar.”
María Luisa Paredes Bartolomé was born on April 3, 1946, in Madrid. Growing up near the city’s famous Teatro Español, she developed an early interest in acting.
In 1960, when she was 14, she made her film debut in “091, Policía al habla” (“Police Calling 091”). Three years later, she was cast in “El mundo sigue” (“Life Goes On”), by the Spanish actor, director and writer Fernando Fernán Gómez. A merciless drama about poverty and other hardships under the authoritarian Franco regime, the movie was not released until 1965 because of government censorship. It was later hailed as a classic.
Other notable films include “Las bicicletas son para el verano” (“Bicycles Are for the Summer”), a 1984 family drama set during the Spanish Civil War and directed by Jaime Chávarri, and “Tras el cristal” (“In a Glass Cage”), a transgressive psychological film from 1986 by Agustí Villaronga, in which she played the wife of a former Nazi doctor and pedophile confined to an iron lung.
Ms. Paredes had a daughter, María Isasi, in the 1970s with the filmmaker Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi, who died in 2017. Ms. Isasi is now an actress. Information on other survivors was not immediately available.
Ms. Paredes received the National Film Award from the Spanish Ministry of Culture in 1996 and an honorary Goya Award from the Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences in 2018.
“This profession,” she said in an interview around the time she received her Goya Award, calls for “absolute rigor and seriousness.”
She added: “It requires dedication, courage, strength — not being defeated by discouragement.”
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