Pedro Almodóvar Actress Was 78

Marisa Paredes, the admired Spanish actress who collaborated with Pedro Almodóvar in such films as The Flower of My Secret, All About My Mother and The Skin I Live In, has died. She was 78.

Her death was announced Tuesday by the Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences of Spain, which called her one of the country’s “most iconic actors … her body of work was defined by women who were strong, ambivalent, broken, passionate, enigmatic, but who were, above all, very human.”

Almodóvar told Spanish public broadcaster RTVE that “it is as if I woke up from a bad dream … I am struggling to come to terms with Marisa’s death.” In their country, she was known as “an Almodóvar girl.”

Paredes also portrayed Roberto Benigni’s socialite mother-in-law in Life Is Beautiful (1997) and the head of the orphanage in Guillermo del Toro’s horror film The Devil’s Backbone (2001), set during the Spanish Civil War.

She and Almodóvar first worked together in Dark Habits (1983), where she played the murdering LSD-using Sister Manure, and they reunited for High Heels (1991), in which she starred as the torch singer Becky.

Paredes earned a Goya Award nomination for her turn as a woman resistant to writing romance novels in The Flower of My Secret (1995). Also for Almodóvar, she played an actress in All About My Mother (1999), a party guest in Talk to Her (2002) and the servant and mother of Antonio Banderas’ mad scientist in The Skin I Live In (2011).

“Heartbroken by the passing of Marisa Paredes, a great lady of acting,” Banderas wrote on social media. “Dear friend, you have left us too soon.”