Do you recognize her on the street?
“I grew up with you!”, they tell me.
For his songs.
I see, I see, mostly.
And others
I recorded 20 albums of songs over 30 years, since 1980: Una cicarra llamada Teresa, Me pongo de pie …
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!
I com la seva mare, Asunción Balaguer.
It was me in her womb, six months old, and she was throwing herself on the floor on stage!
And were you born whole?
At my maternal grandmother’s house, Teresa.
Great Catalan actress, Mama Asunción.
They forced her to lose her Catalan accent. He never lost it.
Why did you leave the race?
To raise their children? Rather to share life with my father.
Accompany your man?
Always, and happy! They loved each other very much.
But he… disappeared, suddenly…
For days But he always came back. And he explained everything to her. My father didn’t cheat.
Did she consent?
I admire my mother’s admiration, love and generosity for my father.
Did you ever scold your mother?
Just once, widow: she was telling others about some of her father’s adventures. I scolded her.
She told me she feared losing her husband one day.
Oh yeah?
He found love correspondence…
Well together until the end: they toasted with champagne on a plane… and he died.
Heart attack over Bordeaux.
My father had recently filmed Goya in Bordeaux there, the end of the great painter’s life… Something premonitory!
What was the best thing about Paco Rabal?
His humanity, his taste for dealing with everyone without distinction. He came home with a beggar.
A beggar?
Antonio “the poor”. Or the owner of the cabarets of Valencia! I worked there… and always had a table in one of those cabarets.
You were a mother… but you worked.
I would have been a very miserable woman if I had not had children. I always wanted to be a mother.
Agree with your partner.
I married a friend of my father’s, my playmate! My father was suspicious at first. After that, everything was phenomenal.
What do you think of the surrogacy commissioned by Ana GarcÃa Obregón?
I applaud the adoption of children: the legal procedures should be made even easier. Every child deserves love and education.
Likewise in surrogacy?
No. Buy a baby conceived by another? I don’t like it, I don’t like it.
What was your childhood like?
We played theater with my mother. With my father, we shot films in Super8, my brother Benito, me and my cousins…
You made your big debut: Viridiana, by Luis Buñuel!
It’s true, I’m the girl who crowns Fernando Rey and stars in other scenes…
What was Luis Buñuel like?
Adorable, tender… My uncle Luis! How he and my father laughed when they were together! They talked about everything.
Buñuel, more sexist than his father?
His sister Conchita served and looked after him. But, ah, what privileged intelligence! He made a lot of fun of religion…
And now you play a nun in a movie…
Believe
Disturbed children, they are scary.
More than fear, the film is disturbing: it reveals the harm 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 a text that we consider sacred.
The sin is literalness, always.
And virtue is the metaphor, the paradox, the game, the joke, the humor, the imagination.
“Imagination does not commit crime”, taught Luis Buñuel.
I will teach this to my grandchildren, and let them know and admire their ancestors, so they know where they come from.
Which actress have you admired the most, apart from your parents?
Berta Riaza and Núria Espert.
Of the films his father made, which one was his favorite?
NazarÃn, by Buñuel. And, growing up, Juncal and Goya in Bordeaux. And I really admired the mother, who at the age of 90 sang and danced in Follie, in the theater: what a presence!
