The artistically daring Spanish actress Marisa Paredes has worked with numerous internationally acclaimed directors, but the origin of her fame lies in her decades-long collaboration with director Pedro Almodóvar. Born in Madrid, Marisa Paredes was studying acting at the Dramatic Arts Conservatory when she began her professional career, in the nineteen-sixties.
Making a name for herself as an actress in Spanish television, theatre and cinema during the sixties and seventies, Paredes began to attract international attention from 1980 onwards. After being a part of the film Sus años dorados (1980) and the Fernando Trueba comedy Ópera Prima, Paredes was, for the first time, part of the cast of a Pedro Almodóvar film, Negros Hábitos (1984).
Along with her other works of the 80’s, Marisa Paredes received the Onda Madrid award for her performance as the wife of a Nazi doctor in a concentration camp in Tras El Cristal (1985). In 1991, the actress received further acclaim after portraying the unbalanced and potentially murderous actress Becky in Pedro Almodóvar’s film Saltos Altos. Consolidating her international fame, Paredes worked, in the 90’s, in French, Mexican, Italian and Spanish productions. After working with Philippe Lioret in Tombés du Ciel (1993), however, she returned to the Almodóvar universe, interpreting troubled writer Leo Macías in the film La flor de mi secreto (1995). She was also part of Chilean director Raoul Ruiz’s innovative film Tres Vidas Y Una Sola Morte, where she played Marcello Mastroianni’s onscreen ex-wife. In 1997 she played Roberto Benigni’s mother-in-law in the dramatic comedy Life is Beautiful, a film which received Oscars for Best Actor, Best Original Score and Best Foreign Language Film. After adding an American production to her curriculum with Talk of Angels (1998), Paredes collaborates with Pedro Almodóvar once more in the critically acclaimed film Todo sobre mi madre, in 1999, where she plays the temperamental and passionate actress Huma Rojo.
The consistent excellence of Marisa Paredes’ work wins her a Goya Prize in 1996. In 2000, she was a member of the Jury at the Berlin Festival, and between 2000 and 2003 she was president of the Spanish Academy of Arts and Cinematographic Sciences. Her last appearance in an Almodóvar film was in 2011 in La piel que habito, which was screened at numerous film festivals, won four Goya prizes and was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.