Marisa Paredes, a Spanish actress who has died at 78, brought some of filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s most fantastical creations to vibrant, idiosyncratic life.
Beginning with the black comedy “Dark Habits” (1983), in which she played an LSD-using nun known as Sister Manure, she appeared in a half-dozen of the acclaimed director’s films, often playing artists and bohemians with a sensuous or seductive side.
Ms. Paredes starred as a cabaret singer involved in a murderous love triangle in Almodóvar’s “High Heels” (1991) and was nominated for a Goya Award, the Spanish equivalent of an Oscar, for his mordant comedy “The Flower of My Secret” (1995). She played a best-selling romance novelist, Leo, who is stuck in an unhappy marriage and finds herself reviewing — and panning — her own books for a newspaper.
“Drinking,” she observes, “is all I am really good at.”
The film propelled Ms. Paredes to wider renown outside Spain, as did her performances as a glamorous theater star in Almodóvar’s “All About My Mother” (1999), which won the Oscar for best foreign language film, and as the housekeeper to a mad scientist (Antonio Banderas) in “The Skin I Live In” (2011), a gender-bending thriller about a plastic surgeon holding a young woman captive.
