Magdalena Tsanis
Madrid (EFE).- The recent publication of her letters with Albert Camus, her lover for 16 years, and the commemorative activities for the centenary of María Casares (1922-1996) are now joined by the premiere of a documentary about her life that seeks to bring the figure of this Galician and universal actress closer to new generations.
Directed by Xavier Villaverde, the documentary “María Casares, the woman who lived a thousand lives” arrives today in movie theaters and reviews the career of what has been one of the great European actresses of the 20th century, daughter of Santiago Casares Quiroga, Head of Government of the Second Republic and exiled in France from 1936 until his death in October 1996.
She became the first actress of the Comedie Française, although it was during the six years in charge of Jean Vilar’s National Popular Theater that she played some of the most important characters of her career, from Lady Macbeth to Marie Tudor and also developed a fruitful collaboration with Argentine Jorge Lavelli.
“I have always lived in a state of urgency”, says Casares at the beginning of the film, made from extracts from his memoirs (“Privileged Resident”, 1980) and from an in-depth interview on Galician television.
Risky, fiery and chameleonic, for Casares the theater was her true passion. In her memoirs, she tells that she often made movies just for money because what she really cared about was being able to freely choose her work on the stage.
Even so, his filmography includes titles such as “The Children of Paradise” (1945) by Marcel Carné, “The Ladies of the Bologna Forest” (1945) by Robert Bresson -whom he says was “a tyrant” on the set- and “Orfeo” (1959) by Jean Cocteau.
Albert Camus, a crucial meeting
Born in A Coruña in 1922 into an atheist, rich and republican family, Casares was educated in a liberal environment with a love for culture, and related to characters such as Ramón María del Valle Inclán, Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti or Margarita Xirgu.
In Paris he rubbed shoulders with Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, Jean Genet and Antonin Artaud. But above all, his meeting with Albert Camus in 1944, in a Paris still occupied by the Nazis, was crucial.
According to the documentary, their relationship as lovers began coinciding with the Allied landing in Normandy, he was 30 years old and she was 21, and their first fleeting phase was interrupted when the war ended and Camus met his wife in Paris, until then in Algeria.
Four years later they met again by chance on the street and nothing could separate them anymore. A deep, complicit and open relationship on both sides to which the more than 800 letters that were written and maintained until Camus’s death in a car accident in 1960 bear witness.
The trauma of war and exile
Xavier Villaverde, the director of the documentary, shot a short in 1985 in a noble house in A Coruña without knowing that it was the home of Santiago Casares Quiroga, which once housed a library of more than 20,000 volumes that was burned after the coup of State of 1936.
There began her curiosity about the figure of María Casares, who began as a reader in that library, and those images that she recorded have served as the start of the documentary.
The first part is dedicated to the first years of the actress’s life, traumatically marked by the outbreak of the Civil War, when her father was Manuel Azaña’s head of government. In her memories, she remembers that the first night after the announcement of Franco’s uprising in Morocco was the worst of her life.
At the age of 13, he fled with his mother to Paris. Her father, discredited in his own ranks, joined them later but in 1940, when France was invaded by the Nazis, he fled to England where he remained until the end of World War II.
María Casares would not return to Spain until 1976 to participate in a production of “El adefesio” by Alberti, but that return gave her, she assures, a feeling of “empty”, a “disadjustment”, due to all that hubbub of freedom that she found alien