Carmen Maura: the embargo of his goyas, a rape and other dramas in his life

[Akrapovic]

The Spanish actress has shown how to face the setbacks that life has given her. At 74, he is still active and with two projects: a film that opens and a play

Carmen Maura just turned 74. Many and many at that age have long since stopped working (by choice or forced), but she continues to chain projects one after another. Right now he is about to release a film entitled 'Cuernavaca' and is on tour with his play 'The Swallow'. With these two works on the table he goes to have fun with Pablo Motos and his team in 'El Hormiguero'.

Carmen is a woman of character and has shown it on and off the screen: inside playing the most diverse characters capable of confronting a surrealist community of neighbors or a gray and overbearing domestic existence based on barbiturates.

But it has been off the screen when the strength of the actress has been most necessary, because her life has been anything but easy.
Life is beautiful sometimes

One of the last setbacks occurred in July 2016, when a court ordered to seize his four goyas (1989, 1991, 2001 and 2006), the Caesar for best actress (2012) and his Donostia award (2013) for a lawsuit filed in 1994.

The bad news added to another series of catastrophic misfortunes in the life of one of our best actresses in Spanish cinema.

The actress with the Donostia award in her hands. (EFE)
The actress with the Donostia award in her hands. (EFE)

1.- Your problems to devote to interpretation:

"I can calmly say that I am good at being an actress," half-jokingly, half seriously, said the protagonist of 'Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown' during an interview. “It's the only thing that I'm good at doing. I have not been an exemplary mother, I have not known how to choose the men of my life ... ”, he added. The truth is that Maura had nothing easy from the beginning. In the 70s, while still very young, he saw an advertisement in the newspaper of the Athenaeum theater requesting semi-professional actors and decided to present himself without saying anything to anyone.

She began to see that getting on stage was not a problem and that success accompanied her. Someone told him that this was what he had to do for the rest of his life, in a tone of anger. “You are too old to start,” her husband told her when he communicated her plans to pursue the world of interpretation. At that time, Maura was already married, had children and knew that she would not have it easy when developing her vocation. "At that time being an actress was like being a whore."

2.- The violation he suffered in his own home:

In the fall of 1975, when they had to go find her home to do a dubbing, Carmen received an unpleasant surprise. When he opened the door of his house, he received a punch and, when he regained consciousness, he had a gun in his temple. An individual had forced her and was stealing from her house. What came next was a real torture. “Two civil guards showed up and asked me and such. I told them the story and when I had told them everything, they picked up the phone and told others: "Go up, it seems to be true."

Carmen Maura, on a previous visit to 'El Hormiguero'. (Antenna 3)
Carmen Maura, on a previous visit to 'El Hormiguero'. (Antenna 3)

The police doubted his word and asked him if he had not invented the history of rape to gain notoriety as an actress. "The prosecutor was a much more disgusting uncle than the rapist," said the actress in an interview with Risto Mejide, when she first spoke of the assault she suffered and the subsequent police investigations in which she felt humiliated.

3.- The concise relationship with their children:

The separation of her husband also brought many problems to the first muse of Almodóvar. Her husband took her children to live in the Canary Islands and she stopped seeing them for a while. The judge gave the reason to him, since the justice considered that he did not comply with the strict morality of then and his abandonment of home, in pursuit of following his dreams, seemed unforgivable even for the obsolete legislation of that time. The few times she could see the children she was accompanied by a person outside the family.

“In a report from the magazine 'Time' made in Jávea in the mid-80s, she appears with the children and these, in turn, with a person who was supposed to watch that she was complying with the moral that was to have in relation to their children ”, explains to Vanitatis someone from the journalistic environment who lived in first person the cruel estrangement of the actress and her offspring. "I stopped seeing my daughter at 13 and saw her again at 17," Maura herself recalled in an interview.

4.- Your dispute with Pedro Almodóvar:

Together they discovered the freedom of a Spain in transition and enjoyed successes that would lead them far away. Maura was the first movie star of an Almodóvar who gave him characters such as' Pepi, Luci, Bom and other girls from the pile ', the housewife addicted to the chemicals of' What have I done to deserve this ?! ! ' or the Pepa tortur