"My father told everything to my mother, he did not cheat!"

Do you recognize her on the street?

They tell me: “I grew up with you!”

For his songs.

I see, I see, mostly.

And so many others.

I recorded twenty albums of songs over 30 years, since 1980: A cicada called Teresa, I stand up…

Singer or actress?

My husband composed songs for me, I sang… But… I feel like an actress.

Like his father, Paco Rabal.

The best actor in the history of Spain!

And as his mother, Asuncion Balaguer.

I was in her womb, six months old, and she was throwing herself on the floor on stage!

And you were born whole?

At my maternal grandmother Teresa’s house.

Great Catalan actress, Mama Asunción.

They forced her to lose her Catalan accent. She never lost it.

Why did your mother leave her career?

For raising their children? More like sharing life with my father.

Accompany your man?

Always, and happy! they loved each other very much.

But he… would disappear and go on a spree.

For days. But she always came back. And he told everything to her. My father did not cheat.

Did she consent to it?

I admire my mother’s admiration, love and generosity for my father.

Have you ever scolded mom?

Only once, now a widow: she told others about some of my father’s adventures. I scolded him.

She told me that she feared losing him one day.

Oh yeah?

He found love correspondence…

Well together to the end: they toasted with champagne on a plane… and he passed away.

Heart attack on Bordeaux.

My father had recently filmed Goya in Bordeaux there, the end of the great painter’s life… Something premonitory!

What was the best of Paco Rabal?

His humanity, his taste for dealing with everyone without distinction. She came home with a beggar.

A beggar?

Antonio “the poor”. Or the owner of all the cabarets in Valencia! I worked in Valencia and I always had a table served in one of those cabarets.

You were a mother… without stopping working.

I would have been a very unhappy woman if I had not had children. She always wanted to be a mom.

Agree with your partner.

I married a friend of my father’s, his party partner! My father was suspicious at first. Then all great.

What do you think of the surrogate pregnancy commissioned by Ana García Obregón?

I applaud the adoption of children: their legal procedures should be made even easier. Every child deserves love and education.

The same in surrogacy?

No. Buy a baby gestated by another? I don’t like it, I don’t like it.

As was his childhood?

With my mother we played theater. With my father, we used to shoot movies in Super8, my brother Benito, me and my cousins…

You made your big debut: Viridiana, by Luis Buñuel!

It’s true, I am the girl who crowns Fernando Rey…

What was Luis Bunuel like?

Adorable, tender… My uncle Luis! How he and my father laughed when they were together! They talked about everything.

Buñuel, more macho than his father?

His sister Conchita served and took care of him. But, ah, what a privileged intelligence! She made fun of religion a lot…

Well now you play a nun in a movie…

Believe

Upset kids are scary.

More than fear, the film disturbs: it reveals the damage that a doctrine can cause in tender and gullible minds.

Catholic doctrine, in this case.

The danger lies in the literal reading of the Bible or any other text that we consider sacred.

Sin is literalness, always.

And virtue is the metaphor, the paradox, the game, the joke, the humor, the imagination.

“Imagination does not offend,” taught Luis Buñuel.

I will teach my grandchildren that, and to know and admire their ancestors, so they know where they come from.

Which actress have you admired the most, apart from your parents?

To Berta Riaza and Núria Espert.

Of the movies your father made, which one did he prefer?

Nazarin, by Buñuel. And, when he was older, Juncal and Goya in Bordeaux. And I admired my mother a lot, who at 90 years old sang and danced in Follie, in the theater: what a presence!