Rossy de Palma has spent nearly forty years walking into Pedro Almodóvar's films and raising the temperature. A face nobody else has, a delivery that plays it straight while everyone around her frets, and a career that has never quite needed to leave his company.
Fi1m perspective
Rossy de Palma does not need to do much. She comes through a door, the camera finds a face that has been called cubist, and everyone else in the scene starts behaving slightly differently. In Bitter Christmas (2026) she is Gabriela, and we noted at the time that the temperature rose a degree or two when she arrived, as it has in Almodóvar's films since the 1980s. The parts are rarely large. They are rarely forgettable either.
She came out of the Madrid Movida as a singer and dancer with the band Peor Impossible, which is where Almodóvar found her in 1986, having come to see them perform. He put her in Law of Desire (1987) and then gave her Marisa in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), the part that introduced her to audiences outside Spain. Kika (1993) and The Flower of My Secret (1995) followed, and by the mid-1990s the label chicas Almodóvar had attached itself to her and stuck. Eight films with him so far, the most recent being Parallel Mothers (2021), as Elena, and Bitter Christmas. In between she has modelled for Jean-Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler, and worked for Robert Altman in Prêt-à-Porter (1994) and Terry Gilliam in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018).
What she does in Women on the Verge is the model for everything since. Carmen Maura's Pepa is the centre and the film is hers, and de Palma's Marisa is one of the people around her whose differences stop the farce from running on one note. She does not compete with Maura; she gives her something to bounce off. We found ourselves pleased every time the film came back to her, and a little disappointed by how little it asked her to do, because the face and the timing are so plainly enough to build a scene on. Almodóvar knows exactly how many seconds of each a scene can take, and he has never been tempted to give her more.
Bitter Christmas shows the limit. The film is slack through the middle, Bárbara Lennie carries it, and Gabriela is a warmth the script switches on when it needs one. Almodóvar has said the part is close to her own persona, and that is the problem as much as the compliment: after forty years he no longer has to ask her for anything. She has said herself that working with him needs few retakes. We believe her. We would still like to see what a director who did not already know that face so well might ask of it.
Biography
Rossy de Palma is a Spanish actress and model. Born Rosa Elena García Echave on 16 September 1964 in Palma, Balearic Islands, she moved to Madrid in the 1980s during the Movida cultural movement. She was a singer and dancer in the pop group Peor Impossible before being discovered by Pedro Almodóvar in 1986.
She made her film debut in Almodóvar’s Law of Desire (1987) and gained international recognition for her role as Marisa in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). She has appeared in several other Almodóvar films, including Kika (1993) and The Flower of My Secret (1995), receiving Goya Award nominations for both. She has also worked with directors such as Robert Altman, appearing as Pilar in Prêt-à-Porter (1994).
