“Joy, joy, joy, / we were born for joy.” It was October 1988 and Concha Velasco was singing a libretto by Antonio Gala with scores by Juan Cánovas at the Teatro Calderón in Madrid. The musical Carmen, Carmen was the first of the two that Gala wrote for Concepción Velasco Varona, (Valladolid, 1939-Majadahonda, 2023), who also starred in four dramatic works by the Cordoban writer and the film adaptation of his novel Beyond the Garden (nineteen ninety six). In Carmen, Carmen, Concha Velasco interprets a reinterpretation of the character of Prosper Mérimée who faces four models of toxic Spanish masculinity – a very young Toni Cantó was there –, from the bullfighter to the politician. That Carmen de Gala was the joy and feminine struggle, murdered again and again by a Spanish virility complexed in the face of break-and-tear women, such as Velasco herself. Twelve minutes of applause and bravery greeted that premiere that sanctioned the hunger for modernity of the Spain that was emerging from the hole.
As much money as she made with Carmen, Carmen, she would lose with La truhana, and those ups and downs were another of the constants of her professional career, forced to work beyond what would surely have been her will to recover from some of the bankruptcies caused by the What happened, not precisely because of her status as a crazy person, but rather because of the love of gambling that was the great love of her life, Paco Marsó, whom she divorced in 2005. Two years earlier, due to financial difficulties, Velasco She locked herself in a hotel room to take her own life, and was miraculously rescued by the laughter she got from a joke by Andreu Buenafuente on television, a story that ended up making them friends.
Thirty-five years have passed since that October night at the Calderón Theater, as modern as everything that the actress, singer and presenter embodied since she became the happy and determined face of developmentalism, in her consecration in The Girls of the Red Cross (1958), his second film as a protagonist. The film was a resounding success at the box office and gave shape to one of the most profitable couples in Spanish cinema of the time, the one she formed with the comedian Tony Leblanc, with whom she would repeat in six other titles that made her the smile of a man. a country that was beginning to push to leave behind the grim cobwebs of combs and mantillas.
Compared to copla cinema, love sickness and quejíos, the titles that Velasco starred in from the late fifties until the transition, under the orders of Pedro Lazaga, José Luis Saenz de Heredia, Fernando Palacios and Mariano Ozores, among others – and in those that shared the bill with the great faces of the time, from Alfredo Landa to José Luis López, including the giant Fernando Fernán Gómez, stuck to the genre of light comedy and, most of the time, urban.
Velasco was the face that paved the country and drove utility vehicles, the Spain that stopped crying over the ill will of a green-eyed gypsy on highway roads and put on a miniskirt. Concha was the Chica ye-yé – a song by Augustó Algueró that appeared in Historias de la television (1965) and that became the actress’s signature – in the country of María de la O. The closest thing that Spain could afford dusty girl from that time to Katharine Hepburn, universal icon of the emancipated woman.
With the arrival of the seventies and then democracy, he left behind the girlfriends and wives of the comedy of manners and began to accept dramatic roles, in titles such as I Didn’t Find Roses for My Mother (1973), Torment (1974), The colmena (1982) or Esquilache (1989), is directed by Josefina Molina, who had given her one of the most important roles of her career, that of Teresa of Ávila, in the TVE series Teresa de Jesús (1984).
Velasco always retained the attitude of the young girl ready to take on the world, the friendliness of an unbeatable smile – and crazy legs that she liked to show off – which also made her a favorite master of television ceremonies and provided her with theatrical successes. that marked the eighties in Spain, like I get off next time, and you? (1981), by Adolfo Marsillach, in which she starred alongside her friend Pepe Sacristán and which both would take to the cinema in 1992.
That irreverent spirit was embodied this Saturday, before the burning chapel of Velasco by the actress Marisa Paredes, when she saw the president of Madrid: “Isabel Díaz Ayuso? Oh my God! What is she doing here? What is she doing here? Out!”. The snub of the veteran actress in the mourning of the one who was always a proud socialist – in 2008 she founded PAZ (Platform of Support for Zapatero) – recalled that intemperance of Fernán Gómez when he kicked out an admirer with intemperate boxes from a book signing . A journalist explained the reason for such insolence: “she does it because she can afford it.” Concha Velasco always said that Fernán Gómez was the Spanish actor who kissed the best and that she would not have cared at all if she had had an affair with him. “But Enma Cohen crossed my path and it was over.” He was also good at losing.
