Marisa Paredes brought a smoky voice and theatrical precision to women whose elegance did not keep them out of trouble. We rate her most highly with Pedro Almodóvar, who understood how much hurt and mischief she could put beneath the poise.
Fi1m perspective
Marisa Paredes can make precise diction and a smoky voice suggest someone determined to keep her composure. Her artists, mothers and authority figures often have an elegance that makes their defiance more striking. We value the hurt and mischief she allows into that poise. The glamour would be less interesting without them.
Dark Habits (1983) began her collaboration with Pedro Almodóvar; High Heels (1991) gave her a major starring role as Becky del Páramo. He made good use of her theatrical precision in his heightened melodramas. Her defining parts followed: the troubled novelist Leo Macías in The Flower of My Secret (1995) and the stage actress Huma Rojo in All About My Mother (1999).
Her international work offers a less direct introduction. In Raúl Ruiz’s Three Lives and Only One Death (1996), she plays Maria, while Marcello Mastroianni takes four roles in a comedy of shifting identities. We recommend its playful lead and inviting puzzle, with a warning that the complications are allowed to run on too long. It is a worthwhile detour through her work, though the attraction is the company rather than a defining Paredes role. Begin here and Mastroianni is likely to be the actor we talk about afterwards.
Life Is Beautiful (1997) needs a stronger caveat: Paredes plays Dora’s mother, but Roberto Benigni’s romance and anxious father dominate our response. We were moved by that father’s anxiety, which makes his need to reassure feel urgent. The film softens its Holocaust setting too much, however, and the comfort it offers is harder to accept than the performance. Watching her international supporting parts in isolation would give a misleading picture of an actor whose strongest opportunities came as complicated women at the centre of Almodóvar’s films.
Guillermo del Toro drew on her sterner authority as Carmen in The Devil’s Backbone (2001). Almodóvar found something more unsettling in Marilia’s loyalty in The Skin I Live In (2011). Start with The Flower of My Secret, where the woman in crisis gets the leading role.
Biography
Marisa Paredes, born María Luisa Paredes Bartolomé, was a Spanish actress. She made her film debut in 1960 in 091: Policía al habla and appeared in more than 75 films, 80 television productions and 15 stage plays over a career spanning 1960 to 2024.
She was frequently cast by Pedro Almodóvar, appearing in Dark Habits (1983), High Heels (1991), The Flower of My Secret (1995), All About My Mother (1999) and The Skin I Live In (2011). Other notable roles include Dora's mother in Life Is Beautiful (1997), Carmen in The Devil's Backbone (2001) and Marilia in The Skin I Live In (2011). She served as president of the Spanish Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 2000 to 2003.
Paredes was married to director and producer Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi and had a daughter, actress María Isasi.
